A crowdsourcing-based game for land cover validation
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ORIGINAL PAPER
A crowdsourcing-based game for land cover validation Maria Antonia Brovelli 1 & Irene Celino 2 & Andrea Fiano 2 & Monia Elisa Molinari 1 & Vijaycharan Venkatachalam 1 Received: 30 March 2017 / Accepted: 17 November 2017 / Published online: 29 November 2017 # Società Italiana di Fotogrammetria e Topografia (SIFET) 2017
Abstract Land cover datasets are critical environmental information which are becoming increasingly available nowadays as open data. Accuracy of these datasets is key for their use in manifold applications and can be obtained through validation processes, e.g., the intercomparison with other existing land cover data. The results of this procedure usually highlight disagreements between the compared products which should be further analyzed. The presented work has the aim to address this need by proposing an innovative crowdsourcing-based game that engages citizens in validating disagreements between land cover datasets. The game was played during the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Europe Conference 2015 by the conference participants and allowed to evaluate the disagreements between the GlobeLand30 and the DUSAF land cover datasets on the Como city area (Italy). The results show the feasibility of the proposed approach and the potentiality of gaming in user engagement for land cover validation campaigns. Keywords Land cover validation . Citizen science . Human computation . Game With A Purpose
Introduction Land cover is often a valuable information in many studies, including climate modeling, biodiversity monitoring, and environmental and sustainable development. However, the usage of such data in many applications cannot neglect its validation and its classification accuracy. Among the available land cover validation techniques, new methods involving citizen science are increasingly growing. The Land Cover Geo-Wiki project represents a well-known example. This Web-based application shows the disagreement areas between three global land cover maps and asks volunteers to identify the correct land cover class according to Google Earth images and their local knowledge (Fritz et al. 2009, 2012). Bastin et al. (2013) also proposed an application to visually assess the uncertainty on land cover information at various levels: from a general rating of its confidence to the quantification of the proportions of land cover types within a reference area.
* Monia Elisa Molinari [email protected] 1
Politecnico di Milano, Como Campus, Via Anzani 42, 22100 Como, Italy
2
CEFRIEL, ICT Institute Politecnico di Milano, Via Fucini 2, 20133 Milan, Italy
Over the recent years, Web-based crowdsourcing/gamified applications have emerged in land cover validation. By introducing game mechanisms (e.g., awards and competition) in non-game activities, this approach wants to stimulate the motivation and increase the participation of people in carrying out the required tasks. The gamification, as stated by Von Ahn (2006), can be a powerful way to solve many large-scale computat
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