Importance

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Abstract

Community members possess information relating to the community, and share that information with other community members to further the goals of the whole community. Some communities--such as geographic positioning system users, music lovers and mail-order businesses--indirectly hire a professional staff to gather information by purchasing professionally assembled directories. However, professionally assembled directories introduce costs for aggregating what community members may already know, and the professional staff's information may not be as accurate as information held by the members. However, simply assembling data from community members may introduce problems of data quality--some community members may be careful, some may be sloppy and some may be malicious. The present invention relates to a system for building a directory of information from members of a community, by distinguishing between members who have historically provided good data and members who have not. A member's data submissions are associated with the member. Corrections to a member's data may result in the system being less likely to accept submissions from that member. More submissions and more usage of the member's data may result in the system being more likely to accept submissions from that member. The system could compensate members with few corrections, many submissions and many references. The intent is to create a community-built directory that rivals or exceeds the quality and completeness of professionally assembled directories. Further, a professional organization could incorporate the invention to improve the quality of results from its staff. The present invention considers an embodiment relating to 'location directories,' which contains items characterized by a geographic location, such as businesses, homes, wireless internet hotspots, events, etc. Aspects of the invention include supporting interfaces, such as automatic methods to prompt users to enter location information, and methods for a user outlining a region (such as a building) on a satellite image or map.

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First Claim