Adding a Map to the World's Largest People-Powered Research Platform

A Map-Sized Gap in Crowdsourced Research

Since launching in 2009, Zooniverse has grown into the world's largest platform for people-powered research. More than 3 million volunteers have completed one billion classifications across over 500 projects, contributing to more than 550 peer-reviewed publications. Volunteers can join from anywhere in the world, and the only training they need is the instructions the researcher writes. The platform also has deep University of Minnesota roots: UMN–Twin Cities is one of the institutions leading Zooniverse's development, alongside the University of Oxford and Chicago's Adler Planetarium.

Zooniverse already offers a rich toolbox for those volunteers. Transcription tools help them pull information out of historical documents. Drawing tools let them outline anything in an image, from cell walls to merging galaxies. Specialized tools support annotating video and 3D models. What the platform didn't have was a way to work with geographic coordinates, so projects that depend on mapping weren't well supported.

How It Works

U-Spatial is helping to close this gap, making Zooniverse even more impactful to researchers, volunteers, and communities. U-Spatial is contributing to the development of three crowdsourced mapping tools on the platform. These tools open up tasks that were hard to run before, like assigning coordinates to the location descriptions written on museum specimens, digitizing features like beaver dams in aerial imagery, and georeferencing historical imagery so it can be mapped alongside modern observations.

U-Spatial Geospatial Developer Ryan Noe serves as the project's mapping ambassador, bridging the gap between researchers and Zooniverse's developers. He works out which features a researcher's project needs, with an eye toward the unique complexity of geospatial data. He has guided both developers and pilot researchers to help the transition go smoothly.

Building a Community of Crowdsourced Mapping

As the tools are refined, Ryan will engage with the research community and the public to connect volunteers with research projects that use this new set of geospatial tools. The aim is to build a community of researchers who use crowdsourced mapping in their work.

Researchers who think their projects might be a good fit are encouraged to get in touch and become early adopters. The U-Spatial team can offer one-on-one guidance on how to get started.

This work is partially funded by the US National Science Foundation: grant OAC 2512443.