Exploring the relationship between “informal standards” and contributor practice in OpenStreetMap

Andrew Hall; Jacob Thebault-Spieker; Shilad Sen; Brent Hecht; Loren G Terveen

doi:10.1145/3233391.3233962

Exploring the relationship between “informal standards” and contributor practice in OpenStreetMap

Andrew Hall, Jacob Thebault-Spieker, Shilad Sen, Brent Hecht, Loren G Terveen

Computer Science and Engineering

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Peer production communities create valuable content such as software, encyclopedia articles, and map data. As part of the creation process, these communities define production standards for their content, e.g., semantic and syntactic requirements. We carried out a study in OpenStreetMap to investigate the role of that community's standards for geographic metadata. We found that most applied metadata was consistent with the community's standards; however, we also found that the standards identified many opportunities for applying metadata that were not achieved. In addition, when we situated the standards in the context of OpenStreetMap's data model, we found a significant amount of ambiguity; the syntax allowed only one value, but everyday meaning - and the standards themselves - called for multiple values. Our results suggest significant opportunities for OpenStreetMap to produce additional valuable open source content to power applications.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450359368
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3233391.3233962
State	Published - Aug 22 2018
Event	14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018 - Paris, France Duration: Aug 22 2018 → Aug 24 2018

Publication series

Name	Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018

Other

Other	14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018
Country/Territory	France
City	Paris
Period	8/22/18 → 8/24/18

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank Allen Lin and Morten Warncke-Wang for assistance and feedback in this research. The research was partially funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF IIS-1527173; NSF IIS-1707319; NSF IIS-1218826; NSF IIS-1111201; NSF IIS-964695).

Keywords

OpenStreetMap
Peer production
Volunteered-geographic information

Access

10.1145/3233391.3233962

OpenUrl availability

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Cite this

Hall, A., Thebault-Spieker, J., Sen, S., Hecht, B., & Terveen, L. G. (2018). Exploring the relationship between “informal standards” and contributor practice in OpenStreetMap. In Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018 Article a10 (Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018). Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1145/3233391.3233962

Exploring the relationship between “informal standards” and contributor practice in OpenStreetMap. / Hall, Andrew; Thebault-Spieker, Jacob; Sen, Shilad et al.
Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2018. a10 (Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Hall, A, Thebault-Spieker, J, Sen, S, Hecht, B & Terveen, LG 2018, Exploring the relationship between “informal standards” and contributor practice in OpenStreetMap. in Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018., a10, Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018, Paris, France, 8/22/18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3233391.3233962

Hall A, Thebault-Spieker J, Sen S, Hecht B, Terveen LG. Exploring the relationship between “informal standards” and contributor practice in OpenStreetMap. In Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. 2018. a10. (Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018). doi: 10.1145/3233391.3233962

Hall, Andrew ; Thebault-Spieker, Jacob ; Sen, Shilad et al. / Exploring the relationship between “informal standards” and contributor practice in OpenStreetMap. Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2018. (Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2018).

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Exploring the relationship between “informal standards” and contributor practice in OpenStreetMap

Abstract

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Keywords

Access

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