Map Gretel: social map service supporting a national mapping agency in data collection

Journal of Geographical Systems https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-018-0288-z ORIGINAL ARTICLE Map Gretel: social map service supporting a national mapping agency in data collection Mikko Rönneberg1 · Mari Laakso1 · Tapani Sarjakoski1 Received: 29 September 2017 / Accepted: 6 December 2018 © The Author(s) 2018 Abstract This study presents results from an on-going social map service pilot that supports a national mapping agency (NMA) in data collection. Results from the pilot show that a VGI map service benefits both citizens and the NMA; the data quality is high enough to suit the needs of an NMA; citizens obtain a means to contribute and be involved in ameliorating maps. The social map service works also as a citizen-tocitizen communication channel as all the contributions are immediately visible to all users. Based on the results of this study, VGI should be further integrated with NMA processes in the future. One way of improving the integration are via services offered to both citizens and NMA employees that borrow features from existing social network services but also from popular games. Commenting, voting and gamification elements can be integrated with the VGI services to benefit both citizens and NMAs. Due to the numerous challenges of VGI the European national mapping agencies involvement in using citizens as data collectors is low. It is, however, within the NMA’s grasp to develop the role of VGI in NMA processes further and to make VGI collection fun. Keywords Volunteered geographic information · National mapping agency · Social map service · Crowdsourcing JEL Classifcation C80 · C88 * Mikko Rönneberg Mari Laakso Tapani Sarjakoski 1 Finnish Geospatial Research Institute FGI, Masala, Finland 13 Vol.:(0123456789) M. Rönneberg et al. 1 Introduction The rise and success of different volunteered geographic information (VGI) activities (Goodchild 2007), together with increasing technological advances, have prompted national mapping agencies (NMAs) to consider the possibilities of using crowdsourced geographic information in topographic data collection. The power of citizens is at its best when it comes to topographic data features that are difficult to map with remote sensing techniques (such as forest paths hidden by trees) or that require local knowledge (such as place names or any other features of interest to people). In some cases, the use of VGI is the best option for mapping temporal changes. However, NMAs have been reluctant to get involved with VGI due to numerous challenges such as data quality, contributor motivation and legal issues (Olteanu-Raimond et al. 2017a). Also more inconspicuous challenges like participation inequality (Haklay 2016) (where most of the contributions are done by a small group of volunteers) and semantic challenges (Ballatore 2016) (such as simple definition conflicts) can have far-reaching consequences. Most likely because of these and many more issues, there have only been a few examples of long-term VGI initiatives. In Europe, many NMAs have some kind of feedback system to collect hints on map updates from citizens. For example, Swisstopo in Switzerland (Federal Office of Topography swisstopo 2018) and Kadaster in the Netherlands (Verbeter de kaart 2018) have active citizen feedback services. In those services, citizen contributions and their status in the update process are visible to all users. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has a long tradition of crowdsourcing its data collection. It has created a dedicated engagement programme to promote and sustain the mapping community called the National Map Corps (McCartney et al. 2015). The collected VGI helps the USGS update its structure points in support of the national map and US topographical maps. However, the features that the USGS collects are limited to a few predefined point-type data features, such as schools (Jackson et al. 2013), hospitals and other public buildings. In all of these existing crowdsourcing services, the collected data are mostly point-type hints about map errors, and they do not seek to offer full map editing tools for complete feature contributions. The most well-known VGI realisation is probably OpenStreetMap (OSM— Arsanjani et al. 2015). In many areas, the OSM data coverage for certain data classes even exceeds the one provided by the authoritative topographic database (Haklay 2010). Even though OSM data are open and free to use, licensing conflicts prevent merging OSM data with authoritative NMA data. OSM data are licensed under the Open Database License ‘ODbL’ 1.0. All data merged with OSM data are to be distributed using the same ODbL licence and therefore requires the attribution of OSM contributors. An NMA could, for example, offer its topographic data as open data under the CCBY licenses, and if so, then they could not be merged with data under the ODbL licence. For map users, the licensing does not usually present a problem as long as the data are open, but for an NMA, it is important to preserve the copyright of the data. Regarding the completeness of the data, NMAs collect data according to certain quality principles 13 Map Gretel: social map service supporting a national mapping… throughout the country, whereas OSM data are often less complete or even missing in certain areas, because of the geographical distribution of contributors and because they fall into different contributor types (Steinmann et al. 2013), who generate data of varying quality. In light of the recent developments in the use of VGI by NMAs, the National Land Survey of Finland (NLS) has been developing a concept for the use of VGI in the data acquired for the national topographic database (NTDB). The aim of the work is to study whether it is possible to raise the quality (i.e. the completeness: missing features, and the accuracy: feature location errors) of the NTDB via crowdsourced information. By offering more advanced map editing tools such as importing GPX tracks and by adding social features such as citizens being able to comment on each others contributions, we wanted to have more complete, accessible and useful data. We also incentivized citizens to create new map features that are currently not in the feature catalogue to reveal the novel data needs of citizens. With this new concept, NLS seeks more refined ways of employing VGI to achieve better-quality map data with fewer resources while developing the relationship between the NMA and citizens. In this paper, we first explain the main principles behind the social map service that we developed in Sect. 2. Then we present the high-level technical and social features of the map service. Outcomes from the pilot, including results from questionnaires and user feedback are presented in Sect. 3. In Sect. 4, we discuss the future implications of VGI in NMA procedures and draw some conclusions. 2 Map Gretel—a social map service Currently, through the existing simple form-based feedback system, the NLS re (...truncated)