Integration of sketch maps in community mapping activities

ABSTRACT Drawing sketch maps is one of the most widely used tools for observation recording in community mapping. However, because sketches are not to scale and features are not precisely located, they are not spatially accurate. With this in mind, consider an important question. Can the use of sketch maps in a community mapping lead to an acceptable result? This article addresses this question by investigating the sketch maps drawn by children in a simulated community mapping. To make the sketches useful, they must be matched and integrated together. Although much research has been conducted about data matching in sketch maps, the integration of data extracted from sketch maps has been less considered. Therefore, this article focuses on the integration of sketch maps and proposes a solution in order to examine the maps more accurately while revising and customizing the existing matching solutions. The output of the data analysis is an integrated sketch map. The accuracy of the matching between the integrated sketch map and the data extracted from OpenStreetMap (OSM) is about 94.8%. In addition, the output contains features that are not present in the OSM data, which means that this output can be used for descriptive and geometric enrichment of metric maps. These results are the output of a simulated community mapping under some strict conditions. Therefore in a real community mapping, one can expect higher accuracy in using the proposed algorithm for matching and integration of the data in sketch maps.