The New York Public Library has been blazing a trail inwards the purpose of citizen cartography through its wonderful Map Warper tool. The tool utilizes the ability of the 'crowd' to help digitize the libraries wonderful collection of historical maps.
Using the tool anyone tin help the Library align their historical maps on altitude of a modern OpenStreetMap of New York. Now that the library has digitized a large release of their maps they ask help inwards identifying edifice footprints on the maps.
The New York Library's novel Building Inspector is unopen to other 'citizen science' tool that allows anyone to help the library position edifice footprints on the library's maps. The library has developed a Map Vectorizer application which automatically detects edifice footprints together with converts them to machine-readable shape files.
The Map Vectorizer tin automatically position edifice footprints inwards an entire borough inwards a thing of hours. However the information footprints are non ever completely accurate. That's where the Building Inspector comes inwards equally it allows users to decide if a edifice footprint is accurate or whether it needs to hold out redrawn.
