Editorial

On 7 October 2014, a first solicitation of a manuscript proposal submission for a Special Content Issue (SCI) on Crowdsourced Mapping to be published in the Cartography and Geographic Information Science (CaGIS) journal was sent out. This solicitation was distributed to members of different list servers, including those from the University Consortium of Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS), and four different Specialty Groups of the AAG (Applied Geography, Cartography, Geographic Information Science and Systems, and Spatial Analysis and Modeling). The solicitation welcomed submissions from the academic, public, and private sectors. Topics appropriate for the SCI were plenty and broadly defined. They included (1) Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI); (2) Citizen Science; (3) Humans as sensors (Sensor-enabled Humans); (4) Mapping user generated geographic information from the crowd, e.g. social media (Flickr, Instagram, Panoramio, …), telecommunication services, social networks (Facebook, Twitter, …), sensor networks; (5) Uncertainty mapping; (6) Data/information quality visualization; (7) Spatial/temporal visualization of crowd analysis; (8) Indicators for Volunteered Geographic Information and Citizen Science; (9) (Re)Mapping unmapped features from the crowd; (10) Collaborative mapping and governments; (11) Data mining and fusion of crowd-based data/information with authoritative data; (12) Metadata production; (13) Mapping costs and benefits; (14) Crowd-based data/information for diverse applications; e.g. cities/environmental monitoring, disaster management, landscape analysis, land use/cover monitoring, social science, ecology, …; (15) Emerging topics and datasets generated from/by the crowd; (16) Big geo(data); (17) OpenStreetMap; (18) Geospatial analysis and Internet of Things (IoT); (19) Digital divide and (geo)information dissemination.

By 30 November 2014, the deadline for manuscript proposal submission, a total of 54 proposals was submitted. One month later, the vast majority of corresponding authors of those 54 proposals were subsequently invited to submit a full manuscript. This decision was made solely by the guest editors. By the end of September 2015, a total of 33 manuscripts was received. Each manuscript was subsequently reviewed (double-blind) by at least two expert reviewers, following standard CaGIS review guidelines. Overall, the innovative aspect and the scientific quality of the research weighted heavily on the decision whether or not a manuscript was accepted or rejected. Altogether, 11 of the 33 manuscripts were accepted for publication pending minor to major revisions, resulting in an acceptance rate of 33%. Similar to a regular issue of CaGIS, the SCI on Crowdsourced Mapping had 96 pages allocated to it. This page count would not have been sufficiently enough to include all 11 papers into one SCI. Based on the amount of revisions that was requested by the reviewers and the guest editors and based on how timely revised manuscripts were returned to the guest editors, a decision was made which of the 11 originally accepted manuscripts would be included into the SCI and which would be published in a regular CaGIS issue. In consultation with the editor of CaGIS, we finally agreed to include six papers in the SCI on Crowdsourced Mapping published in this issue. The remaining five papers will appear in later issues of the journal. We also contacted the corresponding authors from the 22 of the originally 33 received manuscripts that were not selected to be published in the CaGIS journal. We asked them whether they would be interested to have their research, pending necessary revisions, included as a book chapter to be published by Springer entitled Citizen Empowered Mapping (Leitner & Arsanjani, in press). We received a positive feedback from authors from 12 of the 22 manuscripts. These 12 manuscripts were revised according to the original reviewers’ comments and the book editors. At the time of this writing, all 12 book chapters have been finalized and the production of the book has started. We anticipate the book to come out at the same time, as this SCI on Crowdsourced Mapping is published.

The 11 articles accepted for this SCI (six papers) and two future volumes of CaGIS (five papers) are written by 37 different authors with an average of 3.4 authors per article, in part reflecting the collaborative nature of the topic of Crowdsourced Mapping. This topic is also international with contributing authors coming from the US (nine), Belgium (six), Canada, Germany, and Malaysia (five each), Slovakia (three), Poland (two), and China and France (one each). Interestingly, while Crowdsourced Mapping seems to be a very popular research topic in Europe, with 46% (17 out of 37) of all contributing authors coming from this region, it may not be of much interest in China (only one author). It is also noticeable that almost all authors have an academic affiliation, with one author possessing both an academic and a private sector affiliation, and a second author working exclusively in the private sector. Authorship from the governmental sector is completely missing. Nine of the 37 authors’ home departments are in Geography with another six in Geography/GIS-related departments, including Geoinformation (Science) and Geomatics. The second strongest group of authors comes from Engineering Sciences, including Transportation, GIS and Civil Engineering, Geodesy, Electronic, etc. The remaining authors have an Environmental, Social, or Library Sciences and Humanities/Arts background. Overall, it is clear that Crowdsourced Mapping is a highly interdisciplinary topic that is of great research interest not only to Natural, Social, Engineering, and Environmental Sciences, but also to Humanities and the Arts. Geography, in general, and Geographic Information Science, in particular, seem to play a leading role in this research effort.

In the following, the main research focus of each of the 11 papers published in this and future volumes of CaGIS will be briefly introduced. Starting off this SCI is the article by Xu and Nyerges, in which the authors present a conceptual framework for characterizing the collection of user-generated geographic content (UGGC). A case study evaluates the suitability of this framework for the design of a UGGC system. In the second article, Idris et al. evaluate the performance of indigenous people’s use of mobile collection applications that are embedded in a smartphone to facilitate ecotourism asset mapping in a case study of the Royal Belum State Park, Malaysia. The next article by Johnson proposes four models that can define how government accepts direct edits and feedback on geospatial data that are shared using open data platforms with end users. These models form a continuum of government control ranging from high levels of control over data creation to a low level of control. Article #4 by Rosina et al. investigates the potential of OpenStreetMap to improve the accuracy of dasymetric population disaggregation as a complementary ancillary data set together with two other readily available open access ancillary data sets. Disaggregated grids are then validated against reference 1 km census-based data. The fifth article by John et al. investigates an alternative low-cost approach to derive street incline values from Global Positioning Systems traces that have been voluntarily collected by OpenStreetMap contributors. A subsequent validation shows that the accuracy of this approach slightly outperforms incline values derived from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission generated digital elevation models. In the final contribution of this SCI, Alivand and Hochmair analyze various aspects of photo contribution patterns of Panoramio and Flickr, such as identifying areas where annual photo contributions are still growing and areas that undergo a decline in annual contributions. Additionally, multiple regression analysis is used to identify which environmental correlates are associated with an increase in photo-sharing activities.

As has been already mentioned above, 5 of the 11 papers that were submitted to the SCI of Crowdsourced Mapping and accepted by the CaGIS journal will appear outside of the SCI in later issues of the journal. The main reason for this was that the SCI is constraint to 96 pages and this number was exhausted with the six articles included in the SCI. These five papers will now be introduced briefly and their research focus highlighted. The article by Baker et al. (in press) develops a methodology to improve the adoption of a user’s perspective in contemporary routing engines designed for a specific recreational outdoor activity, namely road cycling. Cochrane et al.’s (Cochrane, Corbett, Evans, & Gill, in press) article explores how maps that are explicitly positioned within the realms of power, representation, and epistemology are manifest in the academic Geographic Information Science literature. The paper by Dossin, Kong, and Joyeux-Prunel (in press) discusses how Artl@s, a project which developed a georeferenced historical database of exhibition catalogues, addresses specific challenges that exist, beyond those frequently discussed in general VGI systems (e.g. participants’ motivation and data quality control) in regard to sharing research data in humanities. The article by Czepkiewicz, Jankowski, and Młodkowski (in press) presents two recent case studies, in which geo-questionnaires have been used in Polish cities to obtain public input on quality of life and development preferences in local land use planning. This research evaluates participant recruitment methods focusing on sample representativeness, participant engagement, and data quality. The article by Brandeis et al. (in press) compares 57 Volunteer Geographic Information and Citizen Science projects through a cross-case comparison method to explore project rationale, actor interactions, and data flow as the three main analytic dimensions.

At the end of this editorial, the guest editors would like to thank the editor of CaGIS, Nicholas Chrisman, for accepting to publish this Crowdsourced Mapping SCI in the journal and for his devoted cooperation and support. We also extend our special thanks to the 37 authors for contributing their research to this SCI, since without you this SCI would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.