The Digital Economy is a research programme of Research Council UK, and as part of it the University of Nottingham is running the Horizon Digital Economy research centre. The institute organised a set of theme days, and the latest one focused on ‘supporting the contextual footprint – infrastructure challenges‘. The day was excellent, covering issues such as background on location issues with a review of location technology and a demonstration of car pooling application, data ownership, privacy and control over your information and finally crowdsourcing. I was asked to give a presentation with a bit of background on OpenStreetMap, discuss the motivation of contributors and mention the business models that are based on open geographical information.
For the purpose of this demonstration, I teamed with Nama Raj Budhathoki who is completing his PhD research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Zorica Nedović-Budić (now at University College Dublin). His research focuses on user-generated geographical information, and just before Christmas he run a survey of OpenStreetMap contributors, and I was involved in the design of the questionnaire (as well as being lucky enough to be on Nama’s advisory committee).
So here is the presentation and we plan to give more comprehensive feedback on the survey during State of the Map 2010.
Po Ve Sham - Muki Haklay's personal blog 