SketchMapia: An apporach for user-generated spatial information (SketchMapia)

Basic data for this project

Description

Systems based on user-generated content such as Wikipedia, WikiMapia, and OpenStreetMaps have increasingly gained importance in global acquisition and communication of information. This is particularly the case for spatial information: Traditional acquisition and maintenance of spatial data is slow and expensive, because it is carried out only by government authorities. Since spatial information about the environment is accessible to everybody, ordinary citizens could act as data collectors, which is faster, less expensive, and more dynamic. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is a framework to create, assemble, and disseminate spatial information provided voluntarily by individuals. Current VGI approaches rely on a metric base map, which allow users to add their own content and assign it to a location on the metric map to publish it. The SketchMapia project aims at relaxing technical constraints and proposes to develop a framework taking freehand sketch maps as input. Sketch maps are intuitive and commonly used in human communication about environments. However, due to human cognition, sketch maps are incomplete, distorted, schematized, and therefore not as accurate as metric maps. This project develops a qualitative computational model to represent sketch maps in a computer-understandable way. SketchMapia integrates information from various sketch maps and metric maps into one data repository which can be queried by users via a query-by-sketch interface. Finally, spatial information from sketch maps is integrated with quantitative data to be represented on metric maps.