🚩Dean's Award from College of Science, National Taiwan University: Awards for Bachelor's Thesis (2021).
🚩Outstanding Student Paper Presentation, TGIS Conference (2020).
🚩College Student Research Creativity Award, National Science and Technology Council*, Taiwan* (2020).
🪙Funding: College Student Research Scholarship, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (Sep. 2019-June 2020).
*Below is the summarized version I adapted for the Bulletin of Geographical Society of China in Taiwan (originally in Chinese, then translated by DeepL and revised by myself).
The concept of "Smart Cities" has gained significant traction in recent years, becoming a key urban development vision for cities worldwide. In 2019, Taoyuan City was awarded the "Intelligent Community of the Year" by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), making it the third Taiwanese city to receive this accolade after Taipei (2006) and Taichung (2013). This achievement underscores the Taiwanese public sector's commitment to advancing smart city initiatives.
The proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICT) has enabled the collection, storage, and analysis of vast amounts of geospatial data, allowing for real-time monitoring of urban dynamics such as traffic flow, air quality, and resource distribution. Geographic information has thus emerged as a critical tool for driving smart city development. Across various smart city frameworks, geographic information serves as a foundational element for applications ranging from environmental monitoring and traffic management systems to pandemic resource mapping. This highlights the centrality of geographic information in the future of smart cities, with its evolution closely tied to the availability of more precise and dynamic geospatial data.
While public and private sectors are actively deploying sensor technologies to transform urban data into governance tools, a parallel movement within civil society seeks to democratize geographic information through platforms like OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM operates on a collaborative, wiki-like model, enabling ordinary citizens to contribute to and access geospatial data. This approach, termed "Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)" by geographer Michael Goodchild (2007), empowers non-experts to participate in map-making, a domain traditionally dominated by specialists.
Given the localized nature of geographic information, which is influenced by language, culture, and context, the growth of OSM in different regions relies heavily on the establishment of local communities. In Taiwan, the OSM community has been active since 2008 and has become a vibrant part of the open-source movement. It has developed extensive geospatial datasets and initiated projects tailored to local needs, such as hiking maps and drinking water maps. Notably, the emphasis on "citizen participation" in smart city policies aligns with OSM's grassroots ethos, as both aim to address urban challenges by incorporating public input. This paper explores how urban spaces are sensed, translated, and digitized into geographic information within the contexts of government-led smart city initiatives and community-driven OSM efforts, shedding light on the evolving relationship between citizen identity and urban governance in the digital age.
Like most open-source communities, Taiwan's OSM community relies on a small group of core contributors who account for the majority of data input. Out of nearly 9,000 individuals who have edited data for Taiwan, half have contributed fewer than ten nodes, while 30 highly active contributors have each added over 100,000 nodes, collectively accounting for more than two-thirds of the total dataset. This highlights the critical role of active contributors in sustaining the OSM community.
Fig. 1: The Distribution of Contribution of Data Nodes for Contributors in OSM Taiwan
However, the community does not confer absolute authority to these active contributors. Interviews and online records reveal that there are no enforceable rules governing data contributions; instead, contributors offer suggestions and guidance. While active editors often answer questions or identify data issues, the power dynamics within the community are not hierarchical but based on practical experience and contributions to the OSM database. The more one contributes, the greater their influence and recognition within the community.
The OSM community fosters open discussions through collaborative editing tools and open platforms, ensuring that no single individual can monopolize decision-making or discourse. This is evident in the way OSM data is tagged. The OSM database uses a flexible key-value system, and while there is an official tagging standard based on British conventions, it is not strictly enforced. This flexibility often leads to inconsistencies in tagging, especially for locally specific features. For example, betel nut stalls in Taiwan have been variously tagged as "pickled food shops," "general stores," or "liquor stores," depending on the contributor's perspective. Similarly, night markets, which operate as pedestrian zones at night but are open to vehicles during the day, pose tagging challenges. To address these issues, the community has established dedicated discussion threads for contributors to share insights and resolve discrepancies.