Our latest paper written with Andrew Crooks, Michael Batty, and Richard Milton from CASA entitled “Mapping for the Masses Accessing Web 2.0 Through Crowdsourcing” is now available online via Social Science Computer Review. The print version comes out later in the year.
For those interested the abstract is as follows:
“The authors describe how we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data. The authors begin with GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base. The authors then describe MapTube that enables users to archive maps and demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be shared, and to create new maps from the bottom-up using a combination of crowdcasting, crowdsourcing, and traditional broadcasting. The authors conclude by arguing that such tools are helping to define a neogeography that is essentially ‘‘mapping for the masses,’’ while noting that there are many issues of quality, accuracy, copyright, and trust that will influence the impact of these tools on map-based communication.”
Keywords: network economies; web-based services; map mashups; crowdsourcing; crowdcasting; online GIS.
The paper can be downloaded from here (pdf link).