A crowdsourcing-based game for land cover validation

Land cover datasets are critical environmental information which are becoming increasingly available nowadays as open data. Accuracy of these datasets is key for their use in manifold applications and can be obtained through validation processes, e.g., the intercomparison with other existing land cover data. The results of this procedure usually highlight disagreements between the compared products which should be further analyzed. The presented work has the aim to address this need by proposing an innovative crowdsourcing-based game that engages citizens in validating disagreements between land cover datasets. The game was played during the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Europe Conference 2015 by the conference participants and allowed to evaluate the disagreements between the GlobeLand30 and the DUSAF land cover datasets on the Como city area (Italy). The results show the feasibility of the proposed approach and the potentiality of gaming in user engagement for land cover validation campaigns.