Teaching VGI as a strategy to promote the production of urban digital cartographic databases

Exploring a “real life use case”, the present study analyzed Internet free and open map systems and elected OpenStreetMap as appropriate for undergraduate students who have studied and tested it. OpenStreetMap (OSM) proved to be easily used by students, mainly due to the community-oriented characteristics of this “Volunteered geographic information” — system (VGI). The test conducted by this research work was the adoption of tasks such as mapping towns within cartography disciplines, which confirmed the ability of OSM to contribute to the learning process, using their “local knowledge”, motivated for involving real-life problems of their local neighborhoods as problem-oriented learning approach. A learning step flow (script) indicated that such conditions can be explored in formal academic (cyber-) cartographic education in both ways: cartographic production and education can mutually benefit from each other — based on a collaborative framework pushed by local real-life challenges. Overall, this paper will be of interest to lecturers and students considering using OSM as a “learn by doing” platform for “Location-based service applications” (LBS).