Prototype of a Mobile Application for the Improvement of OSM Data Quality

Sven Leitinger, Daniel Platzer, Harald Rieser and Renate Steinmann , Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH

Details about the talk:
Salzburg Research and the Technical University of Vienna work together on the project FEMroute which focuses on the consideration of gender-specific requirements for mobility supporting services like route planning systems and navigation services. The project has the objective to advance the degree of personalization of route planning systems in order to support humans with different contexts of use in their mobility needs. In current route planning systems only a small set of path selection criteria are available e.g. the fastest route. But travel time or distance are not the only criteria for the selection of a specific route. Influencing factors may also be the availability of restaurants, architecture of buildings etc. Through the collection of gender-related requirements, the fundamentals for target-oriented routing profiles are created.

The obtained target-oriented mobility criteria are used to tag existing OpenStreetMap data with additional, context related information. Mobile applications, with the collector on site, are most suitable for this type of data collection. To this purpose, a prototype of a mobile data collection client for Android smartphones has been developed. This application defines nodes and ways according to a simple ontology (i.e. geometric objects and their required attributes) relevant to the context. Using an ontology allows to filter existing geometries based on different tags, it is for example possible to only show nodes and ways which are relevant for the specific context and are not fully specified. This allows quick assessment of a location, and quick collection of relevant and non-existing data in the location.

Usage of this technology is not limited to this one use-case, however. Using such a client with an ontology based on the OpenStreetMap data (which may be based on the specification in the OpenStreetMap-Wiki) simplifies collection of data, and may result in improvement of data quality in the OpenStreetMap in general.

Details about the speakers:
Sven Leitinger holds a M.Sc. in Geography and is working as a researcher at Salzburg Research since April 2004. His main research interests are Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the field of emergency management, navigation systems for pedestrians, and mobile data acquisition.

Theme: research