Two valuable extensions were made to the system architecture
by Brovelli et al. (2014), which as a whole can facilitate, speed up
and increase data collection. The first extension allows users, when
recording their position from an Android mobile device, to exploit
an interactive map where they can manually select their position.
This is extremely useful to overcome a set of limitations outlined
by Brovelli et al. (2014): GPS coordinates often take significant
time or sometimes are impossible to acquire (e.g. in cases where
significant overhead sky is blocked, such as in cases of heavy forest
canopy or an urban canyons); both positioning precision and accuracy
can be very low, thus undermining the quality of the recorded coordinates; and the survey position may not coincide with the
position of the object being surveyed (e.g. in the case when it is
not physically possible to get close to it). In all these cases, users
can exploit the interactive map within the ODK Collect app to manually
set a position that would either substitute or refine the one
estimated from the GPS.