Conceptualising the geographic world: the dimensions of negotiation in crowdsourced cartography
Ballatore, Andrea and Mooney, P. (2015) Conceptualising the geographic world: the dimensions of negotiation in crowdsourced cartography. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 29 (12), pp. 2310-2327. ISSN 1365-8816.
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2015-Ballatore-Conceptualising the geographic world.pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript Download (595kB) | Preview |
Abstract
In crowdsourced cartographic projects, mappers coordinate their efforts through online tools to produce digital geospatial artefacts, such as maps and gazetteers, which were once the exclusive territory of professional surveyors and cartographers. In order to produce meaningful and coherent data, contributors need to negotiate a shared conceptualisation that defines the domain concepts, such as road, building, train station, forest, and lake, enabling the communi- cation of geographic knowledge. Considering the OpenStreetMap Wiki website as a case study, this article investigates the nature of this negotiation, driven by a small group of mappers in a context of high contribution inequality. De- spite the apparent consensus on the conceptualisation, the negotiation keeps unfolding in a tension between alternative representations, which are often in- commensurable, i.e., hard to integrate and reconcile. In this study, we identify six complementary dimensions of incommensurability that recur in the nego- tiation: (i) ontology, (ii) cartography, (iii) culture and language, (iv) lexical definitions, (v) granularity, and (vi) semantic overload and duplication.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis, available online at the link above. |
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Crowdsourced cartography, semantic negotiation, ontology engineering, volunteered geographic information, OpenStreetMap |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Data Analytics, Birkbeck Institute for |
| Depositing User: | Andrea Ballatore |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Apr 2016 11:51 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:23 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/14874 |
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