Potential of Crowdsourced Traces for Detecting Updates in Authoritative Geographic Data.

Crowdsourced traces collected by GPS devices during sports activities are now widely available on different websites. The goal of this paper is to study the potential of crowdsourced traces coming from GPS devices to highlight updates in authoritative geographic data. To reach this goal, an approach based on two steps is proposed. First, a data matching method is applied to match authoritative data and crowdsourced traces. Second, for the non-matched crowdsourced segments composing a trace, different criteria are defined to decide if whether or not, non-matched segments should be considered as an alert for update in authoritative data. The proposed approach is tested on crowdsourced traces and on BDTOPO (R) authoritative road and path network in mountain area. The results are promising: 727, 1 km of missing paths were found in the test area, which corresponds to 7.7% of the total length of used traces. The discovered missing paths also represent a contribution of 2.4% of the total length of BDTopo (R) road and path network in the test area.