Volunteered geographic information research in the first decade: a narrative review of selected journal articles in GIScience

ABSTRACT

More than 10 years have passed since the coining of the term volunteered geographic information (VGI) in 2007. This article presents the results of a review of the literature concerning VGI. A total of 346 articles published in 24 international refereed journals in GIScience between 2007 and 2017 have been reviewed. The review has uncovered varying levels of popularity of VGI research over space and time, and varying interests in various sources of VGI (e.g. OpenStreetMap) and VGI-related terms (e.g. user-generated content) that point to the multi-perspective nature of VGI. Content-wise, using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), this study has extracted 50 specific research topics pertinent to VGI. The 50 topics have been subsequently clustered into 13 intermediate topics and three overarching themes to allow a hierarchical topic review. The overarching VGI research themes include (1) VGI contributions and contributors, (2) main fields applying VGI, and (3) conceptions and envisions. The review of the articles under the three themes has revealed the progress and the points that demand attention regarding the individual topics. This article also discusses the areas that the existing research has not yet adequately explored and proposes an agenda for potential future research endeavors.

KEYWORDS:

• Volunteered geographic information
• review
• topic analysis
• latent Dirichlet allocation
• research agenda

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data and codes availability statement

The data and codes that support the findings of this study are available in [figshare.com] with the identifier [https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.10260038].

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number: 41901330), GDAS’ Project of Science and Technology Development (grant number: 2020GDASYL-20200103005), the Key Special Project for Introduced Talents Team of Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou) (grant number: GML2019ZD0301), and Guangdong Innovative and Entrepreneurial Research Team Program (grant number: 2016ZT06D336).

Notes on contributors

Yingwei Yan

Yingwei Yan received his PhD degree in geography from the National University of Singapore in 2017. After that he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the GIScience research group at Heidelberg University in Germany. He is currently an Assistant Research Professor in Guangzhou institute of Geography, China. His research interests include volunteered geographic information, citizen GIScience, big geospatial data mining, and computational social science.

Chen-Chieh Feng

Chen-Chieh Feng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore, Singapore. His research interests include conceptualization and formalization of geographic features, qualitative spatial representation and reasoning, and spatial humanity.

Wei Huang

Wei Huangreceived his PhD degree from the Department of Civil Engineering at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada in 2016. From 2016 to 2018, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the GIScience research group at Heidelberg University in Germany. His research interests lie at the intersection of GIScience, transportation and computational social science, focusing on using GIS, geospatial big data and new technologies to progress the understanding of the mechanism of the interaction between human activities, social events and urban systems.

Hongchao Fan

Hongchao Fan is a professor for 3D Geoinformatics at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He received his master’s degree in Geodesy and Geoinformatics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and obtained his PhD at the Technical University of Germany. After that he worked as Group Leader for 3D Data Infrastructure at the Heidelberg University for six years. In 2018, he started his work as a professor at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. His research interests include 3D city modelling, spatial data mining from VGI data and laser scanning.

Yi-Chen Wang

Yi-Chen Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore, Singapore. Her research interests include spatial ecology, public health, and applications of GIS and remote sensing in land change.

Alexander Zipf

Alexander Zipfreceived his PhD degree from Heidelberg University, Germany. He was a Professor of applied computer science and geoinformatics with the University of Applied Sciences, Mainz, Germany. Later he led the Chair of Cartography, Bonn University, Germany. Since 2009, he is the Chair of GIScience at Heidelberg University and since 2019 he is also managing director of the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT gGmbH).