Diffusion of collaborative maps about accessibility

Abstract

Recently, neogeography projects focused on collaborative mapping of localized accessibility knowledge have resulted in applications that are designed to collect ratings of how accessible certain venues (e.g., buildings) are for people who travel in wheelchairs, people with low to no hearing or vision and older adults. Each application is the product of different creators, yet there are striking similarities in their purpose and features. These applications are crowdsourcing systems for information sharing that allow users to add meaningful information to a personalized web map; however, little research has analyzed how these applications have been created and adopted overtime. This paper reviews several existing applications and presents a framework for analyzing their diffusion over time.