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Dear colleagues,

Last week there was the final meeting of two excellent COST Actions networks ‘Mapping and the Citizen Sensor’ , and the ‘European Network for Research on Geographic Information Crowdsourcing (ENERGIC)’ . I congratulate the organisors and all participants in these two COST Actions who have  achieved significant outputs including  a European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Infromation, and a major review of VGI. Thanks to Cristina, Giles, Muki and everyone who worked hard to make these COST Actions a success. I could only attend one day because of other commitments  but i was very inspired taking to many colleagues and seeing all the research happening.

In 2009, i was doing research looking  to  understand  the  issues  of  data  integration  between  crowd sourced information and authoritative data and how do we combine data from authoritative  data sets with feature rich, informal  data (for example- OSM), recognising the variable coverage of OSM while capturing the best of both worlds?    The aim of the research was to look into the mid term and long term effects of crowd sourcing technologies for understanding their effects on the change intelligence  operations  of  national  mapping  agencies  (NMAs)  in  the  future.

We presented some initial ideas on this at AGI 2010 . Details at  http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/3242/1/AGI2010.pdf

One on my students published another paper expanding the ideas on Geospatial Information Integration for Authoritative and Crowd Sourced  data at http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~psznza/papers/Du++:12a.pdf

I remember in 2009 time (it was before these COST actions happened), some folks had bit of sceptism on the value of VGI for NMAs, so i am very pleased to see the change of mindsets happening. Having these successful COST Actions build is good proof of the change in mindset that happened in a very short space of time.   We need to look for the " Best of both worlds".

I am now interested to write a joint paper with interested colleagues mapping the OSM ecosystem to help understand patterns and trends similar to the research i did for mapping collaboration in Open Source Geospatial Ecosystem[1]. So if you are interested in this please contact me and we can expand ideas on this.

Best wishes,

Suchith

Dr. Suchith Anand

http://www.geoforall.org/

GeoForAll - Building and expanding Open Geospatial Science

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9671.2012.01305.x/abstract

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