A framework for classification of volunteered geographic data based on user’s need

Abstract

VGI is an attractive source of data, but the quality assurance limits its usages. This study proposes a framework to estimate the quality of the VGI and to classify them based on the user’s need. For this purpose, a set of properties is defined to describe the data in various aspects. The principal component analysis (PCA) method is applied to reach a new set of uncorrelated indicators (UI). Volunteered data is classified based on the user’s need and takes a quality index (QI). UI and QI values are used to train the ANN. Finally, the trained ANN determines the output of the network in a way that returns QI using the UI as inputs. The proposed method was applied to estimate the quality classes of VGI in a part of an urban area. According to the results of the confusion matrix, the total accuracy of the proposed framework was 81.6%.

Keywords:

• Volunteered geographic data
• quality
• ANNs
• PCA
• indicator

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.