{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,4]],"date-time":"2026-04-04T08:38:36Z","timestamp":1775291916917,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":27,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"1","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2019,12,20]],"date-time":"2019-12-20T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1576800000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["41771484"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["41771484"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["IJGI"],"abstract":"<jats:p>As the world\u2019s largest crowdsourcing-based street view platform, Mapillary has received considerable attention in both research and practical applications. By February 2019, more than 20,000 users worldwide contributed approximately 6.3 million kilometers of streetscape sequences. In this study, we attempted to get a deep insight into the Mapillary project through an exploratory analysis from the perspective of contributors, including the development of users, the spatiotemporal analysis of active users, the contribution modes (walking, cycling, and driving), and the devices used to contribute. It shows that inequality exists in the distribution of contributed users, similar to that in other volunteered geographic information (VGI) projects. However, the inequality in Mapillary contribution is less than in OpenStreetMap (OSM). Compared to OSM, the other main difference is that the data collection demonstrated obvious seasonal variation because contributions to OSM can be accomplished on a computer, whereas images have to be captured on the streets for Mapillary, and this is considerably affected by seasonal weather.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/ijgi9010010","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,12,20]],"date-time":"2019-12-20T09:50:33Z","timestamp":1576835433000},"page":"10","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":37,"title":["The State of Mapillary: An Exploratory Analysis"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"9","author":[{"given":"Dawei","family":"Ma","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"}]},{"given":"Hongchao","family":"Fan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway"}]},{"given":"Wenwen","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 875302, USA"}]},{"given":"Xuan","family":"Ding","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,12,20]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"211","DOI":"10.1007\/s10708-007-9111-y","article-title":"Citizens as sensors: The world of volunteered geography","volume":"69","author":"Goodchild","year":"2007","journal-title":"GeoJournal"},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Neuhold, G. (2017, January 22\u201329). The mapillary vistas dataset for semantic understanding of street scenes. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, Venice, Italy.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICCV.2017.534"},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"170","DOI":"10.1080\/15230406.2016.1211489","article-title":"Spatiotemporal analysis of photo contribution patterns to Panoramio and Flickr","volume":"44","author":"Alivand","year":"2016","journal-title":"Am. Cartogr."},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Yang, A., Fan, H., Jing, N., Sun, Y., and Zipf, A. (2016). Temporal Analysis on Contribution Inequality in OpenStreetMap: A Comparative Study for Four Countries. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf., 5.","DOI":"10.3390\/ijgi5010005"},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"146","DOI":"10.3390\/ijgi1020146","article-title":"Analyzing the Contributor Activity of a Volunteered Geographic Information Project\u2014The Case of OpenStreetMap","volume":"1","author":"Neis","year":"2012","journal-title":"ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf."},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"61","DOI":"10.1080\/15230406.2013.777139","article-title":"Spatial, temporal, and socioeconomic patterns in the use of Twitter and Flickr","volume":"40","author":"Li","year":"2013","journal-title":"Cartogr. Geogr. Inf. Sci."},{"key":"ref_7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"781","DOI":"10.1007\/s13280-018-1020-4","article-title":"Using crowd-sourced photos to assess seasonal patterns of visitor use in mountain-protected areas","volume":"47","author":"Rossi","year":"2018","journal-title":"Ambio"},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"925","DOI":"10.1111\/tgis.12190","article-title":"User Contribution Patterns and Completeness Evaluation of Mapillary, a Crowdsourced Street Level Photo Service","volume":"20","author":"Hochmair","year":"2016","journal-title":"Trans. GIS"},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Juh\u00e1sz, L., and Hochmair, H.H. (2016). Cross-Linkage Between Mapillary Street Level Photos and OSM Edits, in Geospatial Data in a Changing World, Springer.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-33783-8_9"},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Javanmardi, S., Ganjisaffar, Y., Lopes, C., and Baldi, P. (2009, January 11\u201314). User contribution and trust in wikipedia. Proceedings of the 2009 5th International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing, Washington, DC, USA.","DOI":"10.4108\/ICST.COLLABORATECOM2009.8376"},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Arazy, O., and Nov, O. (2010, January 6\u201310). Determinants of wikipedia quality: The roles of global and local contribution inequality. Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Savannah, GA, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/1718918.1718963"},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Haklay, M.E. (2016). Why Is Participation Inequality Important?, Ubiquity Press.","DOI":"10.5334\/bax.c"},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"682","DOI":"10.1068\/b35097","article-title":"How Good is Volunteered Geographical Information? A Comparative Study of OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey Datasets","volume":"37","author":"Haklay","year":"2010","journal-title":"Environ. Plan. B Plan. Des."},{"key":"ref_14","unstructured":"Neis, P., Zielstra, D., Zipf, A., and Struck, A. (2010). Empirische Untersuchungen zur Datenqualit\u00e4t von OpenStreetMap-Erfahrungen aus zwei Jahren Betrieb mehrerer OSM-Online-Dienste, Symposium f\u00fcr Angewandte Geoinformatik."},{"key":"ref_15","first-page":"24","article-title":"Comparative spatial analysis of positional accuracy of OpenStreetMap and proprietary geodata","volume":"2012","author":"Helbich","year":"2012","journal-title":"Proc. GI Forum"},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Mooney, P., Corcoran, P., and Winstanley, A.C. (2010, January 2\u20135). Towards quality metrics for OpenStreetMap. Proceedings of the 18th SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM, San Jose, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/1869790.1869875"},{"key":"ref_17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"963","DOI":"10.1080\/13658816.2011.619501","article-title":"Mining urban land-use patterns from volunteered geographic information by means of genetic algorithms and artificial neural networks","volume":"26","author":"Hagenauer","year":"2012","journal-title":"Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci."},{"key":"ref_18","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Krylov, V.A., and Dahyot, R. (2019). Object Geolocation from Crowdsourced Street Level Imagery, Springer International Publishing.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-030-13453-2_7"},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Yang, A., Fan, H., and Jing, N. (2016). Amateur or Professional: Assessing the Expertise of Major Contributors in OpenStreetMap Based on Contributing Behaviors. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf., 5.","DOI":"10.3390\/ijgi5020021"},{"key":"ref_20","unstructured":"Antoniou, V., and Schlieder, C. Participation patterns, VGI and gamification. Proceedings of the Agile 2014, Orlando, FL, USA."},{"key":"ref_21","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1211","DOI":"10.3390\/ijgi3041211","article-title":"Areal delineation of home regions from contribution and editing patterns in OpenStreetMap","volume":"3","author":"Zielstra","year":"2014","journal-title":"ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf."},{"key":"ref_22","first-page":"149","article-title":"Assessing volunteered geographic information (VGI) quality based on contributors\u2019 mapping behaviours","volume":"2013","author":"Devillers","year":"2013","journal-title":"Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spat. Inf. Sci."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"75","DOI":"10.1111\/j.0033-0124.1985.00075.x","article-title":"An algorithm to construct continuous area cartograms","volume":"37","author":"Dougenik","year":"1985","journal-title":"Prof. Geogr."},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1033","DOI":"10.1080\/13658810802004648","article-title":"Street hierarchies: A minority of streets account for a majority of traffic flow","volume":"23","author":"Jiang","year":"2009","journal-title":"Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci."},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ortega, F., Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M., and Robles, G. (2008, January 7\u201310). On the inequality of contributions to Wikipedia. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008), Waikoloa, HI, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/HICSS.2008.333"},{"key":"ref_26","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"31","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ins.2013.12.062","article-title":"Scaling Up Cosine Interesting Pattern Discovery: A Depth-First Method","volume":"266","author":"Cao","year":"2014","journal-title":"Inf. Sci."},{"key":"ref_27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1652","DOI":"10.1109\/TSMC.2019.2899366","article-title":"Detecting Prosumer-Community Group in Smart Grids from the Multiagent Perspective","volume":"49","author":"Cao","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. -Syst."}],"container-title":["ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2220-9964\/9\/1\/10\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T13:44:12Z","timestamp":1760190252000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2220-9964\/9\/1\/10"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2019,12,20]]},"references-count":27,"journal-issue":{"issue":"1","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,1]]}},"alternative-id":["ijgi9010010"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/ijgi9010010","relation":{},"ISSN":["2220-9964"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2220-9964","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2019,12,20]]}}}