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The Mapossum: A System for Creating, Collecting and Displaying Spatially-Referenced Answers to User-Contributed Questions

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Title
The Mapossum: A System for Creating, Collecting and Displaying Spatially-Referenced Answers to User-Contributed Questions
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188
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CC Attribution 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Production Year2014
Production PlacePortland, Oregon, United States of America

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Abstract
This project, originally inspired by the pop vs soda maps (www.popvssoda.com) seeks to create a web application where any question can be asked and answered by anyone with internet access. The Mapossum allows users to visualize spatial patterns in the questions they wish to pose without the need to possess the knowledge necessary to create maps of their own. The application creates a spatial web-survey system that harnesses the visualization power of a web map to explore the spatial components of question. As a tool it has the ability to help users reveal a different dimension of spatial interactions, and provides more insight into cultural and regional interactions. To accomplish this we have created a framework that abstracts the creation of questions and the logging of spatially referenced responses so that the answers can be mapped as points, or aggregated at various levels of administrative or political units (counties, states, countries). The application utilizes PostGIS/PostgreSQL to store and manipulate the data for the questions, responses, and other spatial data needed to support the application. The information is served as Web Mercator tiles using Python and Mapnik. On the front end these tiles and other data are consumed using the Leaflet JavaScript library. Users have the ability to create questions and the possible responses to these questions, as well as query the responses. The presentation will discuss the framework in detail, and we will demonstrate the use of the application for various types of question Ð response collection scenarios. The application has potential to be used as a general data collection tool for those collecting data in the field. We are also seeking to include the ability to couple the process of both answering and visualizing responses with social networking sites. The Mapossum couples a web-survey system with the visualization power of a web map to explore questions that have a spatial component to them as so many questions do.
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