RoadPlex: A mobile VGI game to collect and validate data for POIs

Because of increasing popularity of smart phones equipped with GPS sensors, more volunteers are expected to join VGI (Volunteered Geographic Information) activities and therefore more positional data will be collected in shorter time. Current statistics from open databases such as OpenStreetMap reveal that although there has been an exponential growth in the number of contributed POIs (Points of Interest), the lack of detailed attribute information is immediately visible. The process of adding attribute information to VGI databases is usually considered as a boring task and it is believed that contributors do not experience a similar level of satisfaction when they add such detailed information compared to tasks like adding new roads or copying building boundaries from satellite imageries. In other crowdsourcing projects, different approaches are taken for engaging contributors in problem solving by ‘hiding’ the tasks behind a game. In the literature, this concept is known as “gamification” or “games with purpose” which encapsulate the idea of entertaining contributors while they are completing a particular defined task. The same concept is used to design a mobile application called “RoadPlex” which aims to collect attribute information for POIs. The increased number of contributions in the past few months confirms that the design characteristics and the methodology of the game are appealing to players. Such growth enables us to evaluate the quality of the generated data through mining the database of answered questions. This paper discusses some contribution results and emphasises the importance of using gamification concepts in the domain of VGI