OpenEventMap; A Volunteered Location Based Service
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Polous, K.; 2Krisp, J.; 3Meng, L.; 4Xiao, J.; 5Shrestha, B.
1TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY MUNICH Email: polous@bv.tum.de
2Augsburg University Email: jukka.krisp@geo.uni-augsburg.de
3TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY MUNICH Email: meng@bv.tum.de
4TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY MUNICH Email: xiao@in.tum.de
5TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY MUNICH Email: shrestha@in.tum.de
Abstract
Our life is affected by myriads of events happening daily all over the world. For an efficient planning and managing of complex systems composed of various components, understanding relationships between an event and the reactive behavior of involved components is vital. Analyzing these complex relations demands for a spatio temporal event based model, in which event plays a central role. In this paper, we developed a framework, which provides possibility of mapping and storing event related information on OpenStreetMap (OSM) platform by volunteers. The study is divided into two different phases; first mapping the event elements by adding new attributes adequately designed for spatio-temporal and semantic event information and second representing the event related information on map by developing a web application, offering a volunteered location based service. To facilitate the event mapping procedure, a Java OpenStreetMap (JOSM) plugin was developed for volunteers. The plugin was developed based on event notion to adequately store and manipulate semantic information of events in OSM structure format. The tool was used by more than 100 volunteers in Munich for the years 2012 to 2014. In addition to manual collection of event related information by volunteers, a crawling framework also was developed to automatically collect freely available event information on various webpages on internet. The framework extracts the exact event elements as the plugin. But the framework crawls each webpage according to some pre-defined rules and follows a post processing step, if necessary. The manually collected events along with the crawled event information are visualized in a web application. The study revealed that providing OSM the possibility of event oriented mapping empowers volunteers to collect higher level of information (event information) for city maps. This information can be furthermore utilized for strategy development and service planning by decision makers.