Paper: GeoKey – open infrastructure for community mapping and science

The special issue of the Human Computation Journal (see the details of the editorial here), summarises the result from the EU FP7 “Citizen Cyberlab” project.

One of the outcomes of the project is the development of the GeoKey platform for participatory mapping. Therefore, a paper that was written with Oliver Roick and Claire Ellul explains the background to the system and its design principles.

The abstract is:

The development of the geospatial web (GeoWeb) over the past decade opened up opportunities for collaborative mapping and large scale data collection at unprecedented scales. Projects such as OpenStreetMap, which engage hundreds of thousands of volunteers in different aspects of mapping physical and human-made objects, to eBird, which records millions of bird observations from across the globe. While these collaborative mapping efforts are impressive in their scale and reach, there is another type of mapping which is localised, frequently carried out over a limited period of time, and aims at solving a specific issue that the people who are living in the locality are facing. These needs are addressed in participatory mapping, which nowadays includes citizen science elements in data collection and management. The paper describes the background and design of a novel infrastructure for participatory mapping and science – GeoKey. The paper provides a differentiation between collaborative and participatory mapping, describes the state of the art and several usecases of community mapping, and the architecture of GeoKey, focussing both on the approaches to data capture and subsequent potential to share the data in an open manner where possible. It also describes the design elements that support learning and creativity in these projects.

The paper is open access and free to read, and you can find it at http://hcjournal.org/ojs/index.php?journal=jhc&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=10.15346%2Fhc.v3i1.8&path%5B%5D=72