Operational use of crowdsourced data: ENERGIC workshop presentation

I’m a participant in the Working Group 3 of the COST Action ENERGIC. The latter is the abbrevation of: European Network Exploring Research into Geospatial Information Crowdsourcing: Software and Methodologies for Harnessing Geographic Information from the Crowd – wow!

The topics of Working Group 3 are Data mining, semantics and volunteered geographic information (VGI) use, i.e. it is roughly about how and to what end crowdsourced data can be put to use. End of may an ENERGIC workshop organised by Dr Ross Purves took place at the Department of Geography of the University of Zurich. Reto Wick was invited as representative of the City of Zurich Open Data team and myself as a representative of the wider „geo-industry“ and service providers. The intent for us was to offer our perspectives on crowdsourced data.

My workshop slides are available on Slideshare, among others they show how Ernst Basler + Partners have used crowdsourced data: for example, for our pedestrian mobility analysis walkalytics. The slides also contain my personal opinion regarding (what – I think – some parts of public administration and industry perceive as) opportunities and threats regarding crowdsourced data. The presentation ends with a short sidenote on (what I posit to be an) interaction between crowdsourcing and the Open Data concept:

We regularly deal with crowdsourcing and open data and have written on these topics on several occasions: see our articles on crowdsourcing and on open data.

Addendum: in the meantime, the city’s Open Data team have published their slides as well: