OpenStreetMap Data Completion Through Gamification

The core idea of the collaborative and free project OpenStreetMap (OSM) is that everyone
should be able to contribute to the community by collecting data by manual survey, GPS
or satellite imagery and make this data available as open data. Nowadays however, it is
not sufficient for a mapping software to just present the latest geometry features. The
requirements of such software have increased especially with smartphones where one expects
further information on geographic features e.g opening hours of a supermarket or cuisine type
of a restaurant etc.
In order to tackle this problem, a variety of expert tools for OSM exist to edit this data.
However, for a much broader audience, these tools are not accesible. That is why in 2012 the
game Kort was launched. It was a gamified web app by means of which one can solve tasks
which enhanced map data. Although quite a success, the game was discontinued.
This work consists of a complete reboot of the project featuring a native solution. Some of
the gamification elements have been adopted and improved. People using Kort can solve
missions and earn so-called «Koins» in order to climb up in the leaderboards. In order to
keep users coming back, a plethora of achievements has been introduced which users can
obtain by solving more missions, hence improving OSM data altogether.
The implementation in this work makes use of a wide range of different technologies. The
backend is written in Python and uses the Connexion framework by Zalando which sits on
top of Flask and exposes a RESTful API based on OpenAPI 2.0 Specification (FKA Swagger
Spec). The services as well as the PostgreSQL database run in Docker containers, enabling
easy deployments on different systems. The frontend is written in JavaScript and uses the
React Native framework by Facebook. This allows to have true native mobile apps while
maintaining only one single codebase.
The result of this work is a native mobile app for the Android and the iOS platform as well as
an all new backend. A new error source (Overpass) with new mission types has been added
as well. The work could be successfully presented at SotM-FR and received broad interest
which resulted in many beta testers. The app is currently in beta, and due to be publicly
released later this summer.