ASM
Weapons of Mass Collaboration
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’.
In the bestselling Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams call them ‘weapons of mass collaboration’. From skype and open-source software, to ‘wiki’ sites and creative commons, new technology has tapped into the recesses of the global brain as never before. And location, it would seem, is smack bang in the middle of it.
‘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.
But are spatial professionals are embracing mass collaboration? It doesn't look like it, which is the loss of both the spatial industry and the open source community.
The Free Data Revolution
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.
‘This project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use,’ says the website. ‘This holds people back from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways.’
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.
Open Source - Not All The Same
These wiki-style sites represent a radically different approach to map making and it can be tempting to try to lump them all together. But there are elements that set them apart.
OSM’s wiki world map allows users to view, create, edit and use geographic data collaboratively. Contributors make trips specifically to record GPS tracks, or take handheld GPS devices with them when they travel. They collect data such as street names, village names and other geographical features using notebooks, digital cameras and voicerecorders.
Likewise, Google Map Maker contains tools that allow users to draw and annotate points, lines and polygons. Users are encouraged to use Google Earth imagery to position their plan accurately, although there is a tool that enables the system to ingest GPS data.
Google does not expect mapmakers to create comprehensive maps of regions. Rather, it wants to see people map the areas and places that are important to them, such as schools, their neighbourhood, their favourite parks and so on.
Google does not have good high resolution imagery of all regions, so in some places accurate mapping will remain difficult. Nevertheless, it appears that the company has moved to a Wiki style approach in areas where the legislative or commercial realities make mapping difficult.
This points to one of the differences between the sites. 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.
The OpenAerialMap (OAM) project is different from both OSM and Google Map Maker in that its main sources of imagery are existing, reusable aerial photosets. So unlike other wikistyle projects, which rely on users to contribute data, the challenge for the OAM community is less focused on the actual collection and verification of content than on obtaining data and working out how to feed it into the system.
‘I think that the best thing for everyone would be if OAM could be seen as a place where governments and other organisations share their imagery without the need to worry about hosting or setting up a web service,’ wrote Schmidt to the OAM mailing list. ‘They simply create data records, upload the imagery, and are done.’
Too Popular to be Accurate?
Despite their important differences, there is no doubt that these sites share one thing in common: the enthusiasm of their members. ‘I try to track and map in and around the south of the Schwäbische Alb (mountain range) because no one else will,’ says Eichi, a user from Germany. ‘Armed with my Nokia N800 and two bicycles, I fight against the empty spaces on the map.’
Eichi is not alone. There are thousands of users just like him all over the world. OSM users in different countries and cities regularly stage public mapping events, such as the mapping party held in Croydon, London, on 2 September this year.
At 10 October, the site had 67,162 users. More than 502 million GPS points had been uploaded, at a rate of about 50 million per month. The data is processed to produce detailed streetlevel maps. These are then published freely on sites such as Wikipedia. They can be used to create data for handheld or in-car navigation devices, or printed and copied without restriction.
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.
OpenStreetMap: From Humble Beginnings to Big Business
OSM found its genesis in Regents Park in the UK in 2004, where self proclaimed ‘freelance hacker’ Steve Coast laid down the first data elements. Cambridge was the first city to be described as ‘complete’ (in so far as any wiki-style project can be described as complete). The Netherlands boasts a remarkably comprehensive map, thanks to Automotive Navigation Data (AND), a geospatial software company based in Rotterdam, which donated its data to the project in 2007.
The project has generated the most interest in the UK, although Germany also houses a very active community of mappers. OSM completed importing the bulk of street and highway data for the US in January this year. This was retrieved from the Census Bureau’s Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) system.
Users made a concerted effort in February 2007 to map the streets of Baghdad remotely, using Yahoo! Aerial Imagery. OSM now claims to have the most comprehensive map of Baghdad of any web mapping service provider.
OSM held its first international conference in July 2007. The State of the Map featured high-profile speakers such as Multimap’s Founder, Sean Phelan, and Ed Parsons, Google’s Geospatial Technologist for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Steve Chilton, chair of the UK Society of Cartographers was also a presenter.
The project’s links with the commercial world have continued to grow as the site’s functionality has evolved. Data can be exported as SVG graphics or sent back to a Garmin GPS and displayed on mobile devices. Cadcorp, Global Mapper and FME also support the OSM XML file format. UK-based Multimap has also sponsored work on OSM.
It looks like OSM is moving up in the world – quickly. It has even caught the attention of Mary Spence, the president of the British Cartographic Society. Spence has publicly lamented the rise of commerical internet maps. She believes that thousands of years of geography and history are being lost as ‘corporate cartographers’ leave landmarks – such as churches, ancient woodlands, stately homes and other important sites – off internet maps for companies such as Google. But she told BBC News in August this year that projects such as OSM, which take advantage of users’ local knowledge, are ‘the first step in the fightback against “corporate blankwash”.’
It is too early to tell whether the expansion of OSM’s links to the professional mapping world will help or hinder the project, and what impact business sponsorship will have on user control of OSM. What is remarkable is the impact that it has made on the commercial world in only four years of existence.
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
Mass collaboration has certainly embraced the idea of ‘location’, even if the spatial industry has not returned the embrace. Here are some examples:
Crowdsourcing
Consider crowdsourcing: an invitation to the public to perform a task traditionally performed by an employee. It caught the public imagination in the search for aviator Steve Fossett.
Fossett’s plane went missing in Nevada in 2007. His friends included executives of DigitalGlobe, who tasked the satellite to image the search area. They then invited the public to scrutinise the resulting imagery. The ultimately unsuccessful search engaged up to 50,000 participants. The data was made available via Amazon Mechanical Turk, a marketplace where ‘human intelligence providers’ – i.e. people – perform specific tasks, co-ordinated by computer software.
Crews conducting an aerial search finally discovered the plane wreckage in October this year.
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.
One unsettling example is Rotten Neighbor [sic], a US-based website designed for the real estate market. Users search and geo-tag the location of their neighbours on a map powered by Google Earth. The data can include a rating and a review explaining why they think the neighbour deserved to be tagged.
Geo-networking
Location even seems poised to become the next stage in the life of web-based social networking and microblogging sites. Twittervision, for example, is a real time geographic visualisation of posts to Twitter (pronounced ‘tweeter’).
It uses location data from Twittermap, a web 2.0 mash-up of Twitter’s public feed and the Google Maps API. Users follow each other on a Google Map through instant messaging and via web-enabled mobile phone updates which provide their location and status.
Research from the University of Colorado found that blogs, maps, photo sites and instant messaging systems – such as Twitter – were better at keeping people informed during an emergency than either the media or government.
It found that during the October 2007 fires in California, for example, Twitter users received minute by minute updates on the location of fires, support services, friends and relatives.
Web Resources
Google Mapmaker
OpenStreetMap
OpenAerialMap
Twittervision
Rotten Neighbour
Wikimapia
