Crowdsourcing for individual needs – the case of routing and navigation for mobility-impaired persons

Routing and navigation web services are becoming widely used, and make use of both commercial and VGI datasets. It is now becoming widely acknowledged that a ‘one fits all’ method of generating and presenting routes is not applicable. In particular, the accessibility of places for the mobility impaired has become a key focus with several services addressing topics such as how accessible locations of interest are and how to best generate routes for people who need to consider additional factors. Though datasources such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) are well suited for such topics, several issues including the quality of the underlying data remain. Through the use of quality assessment tools it is possible to identify areas with inadequate data completeness with regards to the information needed for the mobility impaired and thus encourage the enrichment of these areas through specialised tagging applications. Such data can then be used in routing and navigation services which focus on ensuring that routes being generated and presented fit the personal requirements of the traveller.