Astronomy has long been dominated by expert amateurs, but with geospatial data everywhere, thanks to widely available internet and smartphones, it’s not just that directions that were once only available on a paper map are now updated on your phone in real time to account for traffic.
It also changes the relationships of science. Crowdsourced scientific data will go from obscure protein folding 15 years ago to relevance everywhere.
This development will continue to be driven by how the data is collected.
Credit: Xiao Huang, Emory University
According to the authors, urban planning, transportation, and environmental monitoring have been particularly impacted by crowdsourcing information, with “unique real-time insights and community-driven perspectives, often leading to more responsive and adaptive decision-making,” thanks to user-generated data.
The same kind of data also informs the commercial sector, with better informed customer-centric product development and marketing strategies. The significance of this shift lies in its empowerment of ordinary individuals to contribute to and influence fields traditionally dominated by experts and authorities. This democratization has not only diversified the types of data available, but has also led to richer, more multifaceted insights into human behavior and environmental change.
Despite such a shift, however, the researchers said a comprehensive, overarching perspective is still needed to connect the various data sources, such as social media platforms, with the application domains, such as public health or remote sensing.
“We aim to bridge this gap and provide a holistic view of the use and potential of crowdsourcing geospatial data,” said Emory University professor Xiao Huang. “In this study, we conduct an exhaustive analysis of the current efforts, opportunities and obstacles related to crowdsourced geospatial data across two fundamental perspectives: human observations and Earth observations.”
Earth observations refer to the work of large entities such as academic institutions or government agencies to record data, as opposed to human observations made on social media, for example. By connecting these two perspectives, the researchers identified seven specific challenges: ensuring data quality and accuracy; protection of privacy; training and education of non-experts; maintain data collection; navigating legal and ethical issues; and interpret data. Their paper summarizes the current state of each area, as well as a potential way forward.
“Crowdsourced geospatial data has a critical role and great potential to improve human and Earth observations,” Huang said. “These data, contributed by the general public through various platforms, offer high-resolution spatial observations that traditional methods can miss. This comprehensive review paper emphasizes the democratization of data collection and its implications for various sectors, and underscores the need to integrate these non-traditional data sources for more comprehensive and nuanced understanding.”
The researchers identified three primary future directions: expanding the scope of geospatial crowdsourcing by harnessing the power of the crowd; pioneering a sustainable crowdsourcing ecosystem, from motivation to retention; and translating crowdsourced geospatial data into real impact.
