Enabling Crowdsourcing in the Framework of User-centred SDIs for Information Management of Geographical Volunteer Content

Abstract

The field of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) has emerged with the spirit of providing ‘Data as a Service’ to overcome the technical and conceptual barriers to sharing spatial data. An SDI is developed essentially as an open service platform, in which a loosely coupled system connects users and applications with data sources with a high level of substitutability of components. Development of regional or national SDIs, however, follows a top-down approach that is often governed by laws and directives. Alternatively, Crowdsourcing emerged as a mechanism for contributing data voluntarily. Our work aims to support the future design of open service platforms to enable national and international volunteers to generate, revise, correct, and analyze Georeferenced metadata and data of the Georeferenced content of libraries, archives and museums related to cultural heritage. Such a platform will exploit the strengths of current SDI services, and will positively influence the robustness of current digital libraries and archives. For this work, we wanted to deploy the implementation guidelines of SDIs. Here, we report on our first prototype, which achieves content management loosely through an OGC-compliant wrapper implementation, and we discuss the prospect for more mature, probably INSPIREd, services, in the context of our services framework for information management of Crowdsourced content in the domain of cultural heritage.