Weapons of Mass Collaboration - People power is changing mapping

A must read article about mass collaboration on mapping using the internet and the Weapons of Mass Collaboration like Google Maps, Open Street Map and Wikimapia.

Some excerpts (article by Inga Ting in the Asian Surveying & Mapping site):

People power is changing mapping.

It has major corporations frothing at the mouth. It has Bill Gates in a tizzy. Top executives worldwide are stomping their feet and denouncing its promoters as ‘newfangled Communists in various guises’.

‘While hierarchies are not vanishing, profound changes in the nature of technology, demographics, and the global economy are giving rise to powerful new models of production based on community, collaboration, and self-organisation, rather than on hierarchy and control,’ write Tapscott and Williams.

One of the most successful examples of spatially-driven mass collaboration is OpenStreetMap (OSM). This Creative Commons project has set itself the ambitious goal of creating free maps of the entire world that are continuously edited and upgraded by its users.

There are other sites too. In places where maps are scarce, users of Google Maps can now create their own maps, using Google Map Maker.

WikiMapia allows users to draw annotated polygons on Google Maps. It can be used anywhere.


OpenAerialMap, founded in 2007 by Christopher Schmidt, aims to gather freely available aerial imagery from sources around the world into a single, coherent and open world view.

OSM provides its map data under a Creative Commons licence. So does WikiMapia. This allows similar reuse rights. However, maps created by users of Google Map Maker become the intellectual property of Google.

Unsurprisingly, Google has elected not to use the system in regions where it already has strong commercial relationships with mapmaking organisations.

But, as any professional mapmaker would ask, what about errors? In a recent project, Renee Bartolo - the president of the Spatial Sciences Institute in Australia - compared the accuracy of OSM against Google Map data. She found that OSM had comparatively more errors, but this did not necessarily mean it was less useful.

‘The comparison does not take into account the richness of the content on OpenStreetMap,’ she noted. ‘It contains much more information than the Google site.’ Nor does it take into account the speed with which a wiki site can rectify itself.

The Way Forward for Spatial

So if mass collaboration is pointing the way forward for the industry, technology – and perhaps even human society, as some have suggested – the future is starting to look a little crowded. But maybe that’s a good thing.

Thanks to these tools, hundreds of thousands of people are engaging with spatial information on a scale never before seen. The industry is plagued by skills shortages, but there has never been an easier time to market the spatial industry to younger generations. Just look at everything that’s happening out there.

Location: The Next Step in Open Source

Crowdsourcing

 Consider crowdsourcing: an invitation to the public to perform a task traditionally performed by an employee.

Neighbourhood Watch

While projects such as OAM are driven by a belief that data should be free, other projects focus on bringing hidden, hard to access, or subversive data into the public domain.

Geo-networking
Location even seems poised to become the next stage in the life of web-based social networking and microblogging sites.