Welcome to the SketchMapia project page!
SketchMapia project (SketchMapia: A Framework for Collaborative Mapping) is funded for three years (2011-2014) in the Individual Grants Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
SketchMapia is a framework that contains the complete workflow of collection, recognition, interpretation, integration and visualization of sketch maps. In the context of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), SketchMapia employs sketch maps to contribute geographic information. It opens more capabilities of Geographic Information Systems (GISs) to the general public. In spite people who have difficulties to draw a map, all others can use the sketching interface that SketchMapia provides to produce user-generated spatial contents. However, due to human cognition, sketch maps are incomplete, distorted, schematized, and therefore not as accurate as metric maps. This project develops a qualitative computational model to represent sketch maps in a computer-understandable way. SketchMapia integrates information from various sketch maps and metric maps into one data repository which can be queried by users via a query-by-sketch interface. Finally, spatial information from sketch maps is integrated with quantitative data to be represented on metric maps.
SketchMapia project is now under the development of Spatial Intelligence Lab at University of Münster. You can find the updated involved researcher information and research progress on this website.