This book explores the roles in which volunteered and professional information play within neogeography from a human factors perspective. The unique advantages of each information type are considered alongside how they may be utilised to create products and services delivering highly functional, efficient and satisfying experiences to their users. The overall aim of this book is to address the issue of how Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can be combined with Professional Geographic Information (PGI) to satisfy the information search requirements of consumer-users via highly usable mashups. Firstly, this required the development of an understanding of the way different users perceive VGI and PGI in terms of its benefits to their activities and information needs. Secondly, the benefits that VGI may bring to the user experience of a mashup (which cannot be attained through the use of PGI) needed to be understood. In order to achieve this, a user centred design perspective was implemented throughout the research.

This book is mainly focused on two themes: transportation and smart city applications. Open geospatial science and technology is an increasingly important paradigm that offers the opportunity to promote the democratization of geographical information, the transparency of governments and institutions, as well as social, economic and urban opportunities. During the past decade, developments in the area of open geospatial data have greatly increased. The open source GIS research community believes that combining free and open software, open data, as well as open standards, leads to the creation of a sustainable ecosystem for accelerating new discoveries to help solve global cross-disciplinary urban challenges. The vision of this book is to enrich the existing literature on this topic, and act one step towards more sustainable cities through employment of open source GIS solutions that are reproducible. Various contributions are provided and practically implemented in several urban use cases. Therefore, apart from researchers, lecturers and students in the geography/urbanism domain, crowdsourcing and VGI domain, as well as open source GIS domain, it is believed the specialists and mentors in municipalities and urban planning departments as well as professionals in private companies would be interested to read this book.

Maps are a fundamental resource in a diverse array of applications ranging from everyday activities, such as route planning through the legal demarcation of space to scientific studies, such as those seeking to understand biodiversity and inform the design of nature reserves for species conservation. For a map to have value, it should provide an accurate and timely representation of the phenomenon depicted and this can be a challenge in a dynamic world. Fortunately, mapping activities have benefitted greatly from recent advances in geoinformation technologies. Satellite remote sensing, for example, now offers unparalleled data acquisition and authoritative mapping agencies have developed systems for the routine production of maps in accordance with strict standards. Until recently, much mapping activity was in the exclusive realm of authoritative agencies but technological development has also allowed the rise of the amateur mapping community. The proliferation of inexpensive and highly mobile and location aware devices together with Web 2.0 technology have fostered the emergence of the citizen as a source of data. Mapping presently benefits from vast amounts of spatial data as well as people able to provide observations of geographic phenomena, which can inform map production, revision and evaluation. The great potential of these developments is, however, often limited by concerns. The latter span issues from the nature of the citizens through the way data are collected and shared to the quality and trustworthiness of the data. This book reports on some of the key issues connected with the use of citizen sensors in mapping. It arises from a European Co-operation in Science and Technology (COST) Action, which explored issues linked to topics ranging from citizen motivation, data acquisition, data quality and the use of citizen derived data in the production of maps that rival, and sometimes surpass, maps arising from authoritative agencies.