abstract: A volunteered geographic information system, e.g., OpenStreetMap (OSM), collects data from volunteers to generate geospatial maps. To keep the map consistent, volunteers are expected to perform the tedious task of updating the underlying geospatial data at regular intervals. Such a map curation step takes time and considerable human effort. In this thesis, we propose a framework that improves the process of updating geospatial maps by automatically identifying road changes from user-generated GPS traces. Since GPS traces can be sparse and noisy, the proposed framework validates the map changes with the users before propagating them to a publishable version of the map. The proposed framework achieves up to four times faster map matching performance than the state-of-the-art algorithms with only 0.1-0.3% accuracy loss. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2017