Thoughts on a web based co-productive spatio-temporal information system

Abstract

With the new technologies—summarized under the buzzword “Web 2.0”—the options of web based collaborations have increased strongly. In this context large projects on a voluntary basis like Open Street maps or Wikipedia have formed platforms to accumulate enormous quantities of data. Also in e.Humanities there are trends and plans towards such crowd sourced information systems and, like their big brothers, they face some basic problems: first how to bring together existing but very diverse distributed data in one system and second, how to guarantee the quality of the data—respectively, how to prevent the misuse of a system. The following paper provides some basic ideas for this discussion, without having the claim of being unique or in any way complete. The first part will cover the topic of how to implement a co-productive historical spatio temporal information system using webble technology, and the second part focuses on the question of quality management in such a system.