Geo-Crowdsourcing: Open Street Map workflow

Author: SIGTE - Universitat de Girona, CC-BY-NC-ND.

"OpenStreetMap is built by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafes, railway stations, and much more, all over the world. (OSM, 2015)".

OSM is a collaborative project to create and provide free geographic data worldwide. This initiative is a reference along the collaborative mapping projects where people around the world contribute to create a free geographic database of the planet earth.

The training module seeks to highlight the OSM wokflow: starting with the capture and acquisition of geographical information, to editing and publishing the data.

The overall objective of this training module is to provide a general knowledge about a collaborative mapping project and its main applications. Getting a good knowledge about the tools and techniques to acquire and create new data, and how to contribute this data to the project is also a general objective of this training module.

There are also some secondary objectives to achieve:

• To show the OSM general work flow.
• To use the properly methods to acquire data based on field work as well as from third open data sources.
• To compare and analyse OSM related software.
• To know potential applications of OSM Data.

The training module consists of 4 main units or topics:

Part 1: Introduction to OSM

Part 2: Working with OSM

Part 3: Data capture and Data maintenance

Part 4: OSM data work flow

When completing this module, the learner is expected:

• to identify the tools and techniques related to data acquisition process
• to use mobile devices for data capture
• to identify the basic information to be incorporated on a map
• to upload the acquired and edited data to the OSM worldwide map

This training module is intended for users that want to use OSM data for its own projects, and contribute back data to the collaborative mapping project.