Collaborative, crowd-sourced and self-generated maps : opportunities, issues and challenges for the cartography / GIScience community
Cartwright, William
Blais (1992) wrote almost two decades ago that paper maps and charts and their electronic counterparts generally fall short of expectations to provide different perspective views, to display spatial and thematic changes over a period of time, to characterise the behaviour of natural processes, and to exhibit the topological relationships between classes of geomorphological features. However, when one thinks of visualising a space one thinks of maps. They work, but conventionall maps may not always the most appropriate artefact. Comments like that from Blais are still commonplace in the geospatial sciences, where, to fix a problem, betterr devices (read more of the same) have been demanded. But, just developing a better device, rather than a different device, simply means more of the same, but something that is quicker, smaller, more portable or incorporating more switchess. Perhaps there now exists the need to look beyond the formal world of contemporaryy surveying and mapping, where the academy of thought and proceduress generally dictates what we do, and consider if new and emerging procedures might complement what we do. The world of neocartographyy, that loosley-linked and organised community of collaborative cartographer - individuals that volunteer geographic information and social software, delivered via Web 2.0, might be a prospective partner for mainstreamm surveying and mapping.
Only personal, non-commercial use of this document is allowed.