Participatory Geographic Information Systems Within a Crowdsourcing Environment, With Special Reference to Volunteered Geographic Information

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are essentially concerned with fixing locations of features and attaching data to them. This geographic data is subsequently used in spatial analysis as a means to support problem analysis and solution modeling through exploratory data analysis and experimentation with various alternative solutions. Ultimately GIS is used for informed decision making. With the advent of technologies that support participation, digital mapping, Global Positioning System (GPS), the internet, Web Mapping, Web GIS, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies and smart phones, many people all over the world have become capacitated to collect and communicate geo-tagged multimedia information, a phenomenon that is known as crowdsourcing. One example of crowdsourcing is incorporating geotagged information collected by volunteers into a GIS. Consequently, crowdsourcing facilitates PGIS to become a powerful practice that can be leveraged to collect geographic data over extensive landscapes and often in near real time.