Citizen Mapping And Charting How Crowdsourcing is Helping to Revolutionize Mapping & Charting

Since the dawn of time people have been making maps. Although often crude pictographs they helped tell a story and pass information from one to another. Such mapping was done by anyone and everyone. Eventually mapping became the domain of skilled mapmakers and so the amateur’s role began a gradual decline. Then technology changed the game. GPS was adopted wholeheartedly by the public, digital cameras were everywhere, broadband Internet arrived and suddenly people's natural wish to document and display what they have seen became fulfilled. Tourists now regularly document their travel by logging their photos online through such services as Flickr.com or Panoramio.com. The concept of geotagging-adding spatial data to the digital photos meta-data- is now done in increasing amounts by an eager segment of the population. As of November 2008 Flickr had 3 billion geotagged photos with more flooding in at a rate of 5 million each day. One can only expect an increase in this flooding with the release of new GPS embedded cameras from Nikon, Canon and others. The wiki concept, so popular in the form of Wikipedia, has grown in size and influence despite what anyone might have predicted. Who knew that thousands of well educated, literate and well read citizen