> What does > cost to have to constantly maintain, correct and be legally > responsible for the accuracy of the base-maps? What is the cost of > manufacturing enthusiast volunteer participation? What comes at a > lower cost of investment via voluntary community collaboration?
The OSMCP project at USGS is trying to directly answer some of these questions. See: http://navigator.er.usgs.gov An Open File Report is due out real soon now describing the results of the first phase of the OSMCP. We are starting to compile data from the second phase where we are more directly comparing volunteer-sourced data (and quality control) to in-house processes. Real bean-counting stuff. > to your proprietary dataset. When Jo Walsh first suggested community > self-mapping a decade ago she did it with some derision - that it > wasn't feasible. At the time it wasn't - we were not trained that way. In 1994, Nancy Tosta wrote in Geo Info Systems about community mapping. The problem, at least within the context of authoritarian mapping (like at the USGS), isn't the technical aspects. The problem is more how to make community map data "authoritative". The USGS has had a string of volunteer map projects dating back to the 90s when Tosta was there. All of them ran into the problem that the cost of making community-generated data authoritative was too costly. To be honest, the USGS doesn't actually have a well-defined process or cost model for making data generated by other means "authoritative" short of government actually doing the survey. > I'm happy to chair a session on this topic next week anyway if folks wish. Unfortunately, I won't be in California next week. But Greg Matthews should be at Where 2.0 and (hopefully) WhereCamp. I emailed him to see if he would join your panel. -Eric _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
