OurMap: Representing crowdsourced annotations on geospatial coordinates as Linked Open Data

Abstract

There is an increasing number of initiatives using Web-based mapping systems that rely on crowdsourcing as a collaborative problem-solving and data production model. In these initiatives, large groups of users can collaboratively annotate spatial things on a map. Ideally, these crowdsourcing initiatives should produce Linked Open Data (LOD) to enable people/systems to share structured data and, consequently, improve distributed problem-solving on the Web. This paper presents an approach for producing LOD from crowdsourced annotations on Web-based mapping systems. In this approach, annotations are represented using the Open Annotation data model and they have as target a geospatial coordinate referenced using the geo URI. Moreover, we combine crowdsourced map annotations with semantic Web technologies to enrich maps with semantic information. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we present the OurMap system, which performs the proposed approach allowing the representation of open and semantic annotations associated with geospatial coordinates independently of the Web map interface adopted. © Springer-Verlag 2013.