Geospatial anarchy

It’s not that long ago since I started my PhD, but it feels like more time than a mere 2.5 months since.

But, what have I been doing? Well, one thing is that I’m taking classes, so some time has been spent attending lectures and examns (had my first examn in 8 years today, strange feeling). I’ve also started my literature review, so I’ve done a lot of reading.

But, to not derail too much: the title of this blog post is “Geospatial Anarchy”, which was the title of a talk I gave at the danish mapping conference “Kortdage” a week ago (see abstract here). The talk was in Norwegian (but understandable by danes, I hope). There is not much of a point in sharing my slides, as they are kinda devoid of meaning without me talking.

But, even better, the conference also asked if I could write an article covering the topic of the talk. Given the rather short deadline I opted out of the peer-review-process, but submitted a non-reviewed article.

I’ll post the abstract here, and if you want to read the whole article it’s available here.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the largest and best-known example of geospatial data creation using Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). A large group of non-specialists joins their efforts online to create an open, worldwide map of the world. The project differs from traditional management of geospatial data on several accounts: both the underlying technology (Open Source components) and the mindset (schema-less structures using tags and changesets). We review how traditional organizations are currently using the OSM technology to meet their needs and how the mindset of OSM could be employed to traditional management of spatial datasets as well.

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