Conceptualising the geographic world: the dimensions of negotiation in crowdsourced cartography

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 communication 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. Despite the apparent consensus on the conceptualisation, the negotiation keeps unfolding in a tension between alternative representations, which are often incommensurable, i.e., hard to integrate and reconcile. In this study, we identify six complementary dimensions of incommensurability that recur in the negotiation: (1) ontology, (2) cartography, (3) culture and language, (4) lexical definitions, (5) granularity, and (6) semantic overload and duplication.

Keywords:

• crowdsourced cartography
• semantic negotiation
• ontology engineering
• volunteered geographic information
• OpenStreetMap

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Derek O’Callaghan (University College Dublin) for his valuable input, and the E.U. COST Action TD1202 for providing a platform for discussion. This research received no grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

ORCID

Andrea Ballatore http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3477-7654

Notes

1. http://www.openstreetmap.org

2. http://forum.openstreetmap.org

3. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org

4. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editors

5. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Renderers

6. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features

7. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:waterway=river

8. The data set includes activity from April 2005 to November 2012.

9. Bots were removed from the data set to focus on manual contributions.

10. http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu

11. http://mapnik.org

12. http://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto

13. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Polar_Regions_Rendering_Issues

14. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway:International_equivalence

15. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IT:Map_Features

16. Pensioni a conduzione familiare, Bed & Breakfast, agriturismi, affittacamere, locande, foresterie, etc.

17. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Tags

18. http://wheelmap.org