A review of volunteered geographic information quality assessment methods

ABSTRACT

With the ubiquity of advanced web technologies and location-sensing hand held devices, citizens regardless of their knowledge or expertise, are able to produce spatial information. This phenomenon is known as volunteered geographic information (VGI). During the past decade VGI has been used as a data source supporting a wide range of services, such as environmental monitoring, events reporting, human movement analysis, disaster management, etc. However, these volunteer-contributed data also come with varying quality. Reasons for this are: data is produced by heterogeneous contributors, using various technologies and tools, having different level of details and precision, serving heterogeneous purposes, and a lack of gatekeepers. Crowd-sourcing, social, and geographic approaches have been proposed and later followed to develop appropriate methods to assess the quality measures and indicators of VGI. In this article, we review various quality measures and indicators for selected types of VGI and existing quality assessment methods. As an outcome, the article presents a classification of VGI with current methods utilized to assess the quality of selected types of VGI. Through these findings, we introduce data mining as an additional approach for quality handling in VGI.

KEYWORDS:

• Volunteered geographic information
• spatial data quality
• spatial data applications

Acknowledgments

This has been partly funded by the SPP programme: [Grant agreement number 1335 (ViAMoD)]; the European Unions’s Seventh Framework Programme: [Grant agreement number 612096 (CAP4Access)]; and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). We thank particularly Tobias Schreck, Alexander Zipf, Mohamed Bakillah, and Hongchao Fan for their valuable discussions on the topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://www.openstreetmap.org

2. http://www.wikimapia.org

3. https://www.google.com/maps/mm

4. http://www.mapsharetool.com/external-iframe/external.jsp

5. http://www.flickr.com

6. http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards.htm

7. http://www.isotc211.org/

8. http://ebay.about.com/od/gettingstarted/a/gs_feed.htm

9. http://geotagx.org/

10. https://scholar.google.com/scholar/about.html

11. http://maps.live.com

12. https://www.mturk.com

13. https://foursquare.com/

14. https://www.ingress.com/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the SPP programme [grant agreement number 1335 (ViAMoD)]; the European Unions’s Seventh Framework Programme [grant agreement number 612096 (CAP4Access)]; and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).