Recent Developments and Future Trends in Volunteered Geographic Information Research: The Case of OpenStreetMap

User-generated content (UGC) platforms on the Internet have experienced a steep increase in data contributions in recent years. The ubiquitous usage of location-enabled devices, such as smartphones, allows contributors to share their geographic information on a number of selected online portals. The collected information is oftentimes referred to as volunteered geographic information (VGI). One of the most utilized, analyzed and cited VGI-platforms, with an increasing popularity over the past few years, is OpenStreetMap (OSM), whose main goal it is to create a freely available geographic database of the world. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in VGI research, focusing on its collaboratively collected geodata and corresponding contributor patterns. Additionally, trends in the realm of OSM research are discussed, highlighting which aspects need to be investigated more closely in the near future

Geoinformatics in Citizen Science

The book features contributions that report original research in the theoretical, technological, and social aspects of geoinformation methods, as applied to supporting citizen science. Specifically, the book focuses on the technological aspects of the field and their application toward the recruitment of volunteers and the collection, management, and analysis of geotagged information to support volunteer involvement in scientific projects. Internationally renowned research groups share research in three areas: First, the key methods of geoinformatics within citizen science initiatives to support scientists in discovering new knowledge in specific application domains or in performing relevant activities, such as reliable geodata filtering, management, analysis, synthesis, sharing, and visualization; second, the critical aspects of citizen science initiatives that call for emerging or novel approaches of geoinformatics to acquire and handle geoinformation; and third, novel geoinformatics research that could serve in support of citizen science

The impact of urban road network morphology on pedestrian wayfinding behavior

During wayfinding pedestrians do not always choose the shortest available route. Instead, route choices are guided by several well-known wayfinding strategies or heuristics. These heuristics minimize cognitive effort and usually lead to satisfactory route choices. Our previous study evaluated the costs of four well-known pedestrian wayfinding heuristics and their variation across nine network morphologies. It was observed that the variation in the cost of these wayfinding heuristics increased with an increase in the irregularity of the network, indicating that people may opt for more diverse heuristics while walking through relatively regular networks, and may prefer specific heuristics in the relatively irregular ones. The study presented here aims to investigate this claim by comparing simulated routes with observed pedestrian trajectories in Beijing and Melbourne, two cities at opposite ends of the regularity spectrum. We found that the values of mean route length and mean Network Hausdorff Distance for walking trips made in Melbourne were consistently lesser than the corresponding values obtained in Beijing. Also, across both the cities, we found that while there was minimal variation in the popularity of heuristics overall, in cases where different heuristics produced dissimilar routes, the shortest leg first strategy and the least angle strategy were more popular