Citizen science for pedestrian cartography: collection and moderation of walkable routes in cities through mobile gamification

Abstract

Digital geographical maps can be regarded as a user interface for understanding and navigating the city. Nevertheless, contemporary digital maps over-emphasize the needs of motor vehicles. Pedestrian routes have only been considered as an add-on option in existing digital maps and the respective data collection has not been performed in the field. In this article, we present a mobile application that employs gamification as a means to engage users to collect pragmatic data about walkable routes, which are then processed with the goal of creating a new kind of pedestrian-friendly cartography. Besides the technical infrastructure for collecting and filtering the route traces, the main challenge in user-generated walkable routes is the identification of malicious data, which should be rejected, as well as the rewarding of constructive behavior through peer-review. For this purpose, the mobile application employs a point system in order to identify and discourage the submission of bad routes. A longitudinal (2-months) field study of the mobile application confirmed that gamification facilitates effective data collection for producing pedestrian cartography even with few users and demonstrated that gamification infuses a shared responsibly about the quality of data collection. The visualization of the pedestrian-generated data on a map required a partially manual process, thus, further research should explore the gamification of the data visualization part, too.

Is Virtual Citizen Science A Game?

“…A number of studies surveyed associated competitive elements with reductions in the time spent by volunteers on each contribution, raising the possibility that participants could rush, introducing errors to data [Mekler et al 2013;Siu et al 2014]. Furthermore, players showed an unwillingness to provide some forms of data, regardless of the rewards offered by games, leading to incomplete data submissions [Kapenekakis and Chorianopoulos 2017]. While game features generally had little effect when attempting to increase the accuracy and quality of submissions, studies suggest that players are influenced by the way in which tasks are framed.…”

Use and Perceptions of Pedestrian Navigation Apps: Findings from Bologna and Porto

“…About 7% of users also highlighted the need for improving the pedestrian navigation service, especially by including more built environment and transport data, to reach the pedestrians' needs and preferences more effectively. It has been argued that one feasible way to increase the number of people walking is to provide as much information as possible about the most walkable streets and areas in our cities, which require mapping services showing the suitability of a street for walking [69]. However, as described in the Background [16,17,70], PNAs are inspired by car navigation systems, which are strongly based on road networks, distances and turn-by-turn instructions, which do not effectively and properly reply to the pedestrians' needs.…”

Raumbezogene Visualisierung trifft auf Landschaftsforschung und „Pinballology“: Beispiele der Landschaftskonstruktion in Flipperspielen

“…Thanks to developments in neighboring academic disciplines and related industries, such as gaming, informatics and (other) engineering fields, the opportunities for enhancing the visualization of geographic space are undergoing a permanently ongoing development. This leads to new variants of media that can include many new facets and features, such as high-quality sound (e.g., Berger and Bill 2019;Edler and Vetter 2019;Indans et al 2019;Hruby 2019;Lammert-Siepmann et al 2017;Schito and Fabrikant 2018), information graphics (Dunlap and Lowenthal 2016;Meier 2017;Schiewe 2017), 3D animation (Edler et al 2018a;Kersten et al 2018;Lovett et al 2015), and gamified interaction techniques (Ahlqvist 2011;Kapenekakis and Chorianopoulos 2017;Lütjens et al 2019)-to name just a few examples that are intensively discussed in recent international literature of cartography and related disciplines.…”