A Citizen Science Approach for Collecting Toponyms

Abstract

Abstract:The emerging trends and technologies of surveying and mapping potentially enable local experts to contribute and share their local geographical knowledge of place names (toponyms). We can see the increasing numbers of toponyms in digital platforms, such as OpenStreetMap, Facebook Place Editor, Swarm Foursquare, and Google Local Guide. On the other hand, government agencies keep working to produce concise and complete gazetteers. Crowdsourced geographic information and citizen science approaches offer a new paradigm of toponym collection. This paper addresses issues in the advancing toponym practice. First, we systematically examined the current state of toponym collection and handling practice by multiple stakeholders, and we identified a recurring set of problems. Secondly, we developed a citizen science approach, based on a crowdsourcing level of participation, to collect toponyms. Thirdly, we examined the implementation in the context of an Indonesian case study. The results show that public participation in toponym collection is an approach with the potential to solve problems in toponym handling, such as limited human resources, accessibility, and completeness of toponym information. The lessons learnt include the knowledge that the success of this approach depends on the willingness of the government to advance their workflow, the degree of collaboration between stakeholders, and the presence of a communicative approach in introducing and sharing toponym guidelines with the community.Keywords: citizen science; volunteered geographic information (VGI); toponym; crowdsourced data collection; data quality Opportunities for New Approaches to Collect Place NamesPlace names (known as toponyms) are an indispensable component of our communication about geographic features or regions, both natural and man-made [1,2]. They serve many purposes, including the obvious need for unambiguous identification for navigation, but also for current territorial claims and managing a society's past (e.g., to compare the renaming of streets or even entire cities following a regime change) [3][4][5][6][7][8]. Toponyms frequently have deeper meanings, often involving complicated semantics related to language and history [9][10][11], but many toponyms also describe the features they name. Some example toponyms from Indonesia are derived from folklore tales (Mount Tangkubanperahu, Banyuwangi), historical names (Jakarta from Jayakarta), or names of persons that have been adjusted to the local language (Malioboro from General Malborough, or Sampur from Zandvoort) [12][13][14]. Other (natural) features can cross multiple linguistic regions, for example, the river "Danube" has several names: "Donau" in Germany and Austria, "Dunaj" in Slovakia, "Duna" in Hungary, "Dunav" in Croatia and Serbia, "Dunav" and " On the other hand, government agencies p working to produce concise and complete gazetteers. Crowdsourced geographic information d citizen science approaches offer a new paradigm of toponym collection. This paper addresses ues ...

A Conceptual Model for Participants and Activities in Citizen Science Projects

“…The pilot projects led to the development of a participatory toponym handling framework (Perdana and Ostermann 2018). More importantly for this chapter, the framework adopted several concepts from an early version of Working Group 5's citizen science conceptual model.…”

Spatial Knowledge: A Potential to Enhance Public Participation?

“…The active usage of spatial knowledge provides the potential for the knowledge co-production process. Previous studies have shown good examples, such as the knowledge co-production to solve the pollution issue in Durban [24], to collect toponym information in Indonesia [57,58], or to tackle environmental burdens in Dortmund urban areas [54], How to effectively use spatial knowledge is also a challenge. Our results reveal that most of the participants in Musrenbang limited their focus mainly on their own neighborhoods, giving the impression that the spatial boundaries have a significant influence on the formation of bounded solidarity within a community.…”

“…Nowadays, the production and use of spatial data have shifted from only an expert-driven process to a process where organizations or citizens worldwide can get involved [23,63]. For instance, the universal use of spatial data applications, such as Google Maps and Open Street Map, allows people to become an active contributor to spatial data [57,64,65]. Despite broader access to various types of online geospatial data and information, we found that the village stakeholders did not make use of the available data to enhance the decision-making process.…”

Eliciting Knowledge on Technical and Legal Aspects of Participatory Toponym Handling

“…In this case, we start learning from the existing workflow of VGI and citizen science or crowdsourcing as the lowest level of citizen science (according to Haklay's typology of participation [14]. Currently, local governments are actively involved in toponym handling, and they sometimes involve university students to explore participation through crowdsourcing in toponymic surveys [32]. Based on these background situations, our initial proposal for a generic framework for PTH included three processes: Traditional survey, citizen participation, and toponymic CGI A framework for PTH was developed through several steps shown in the workflow (Figure 1).…”