A web-based geovisualization framework for exploratory analysis of individual VGI contributor’s participation characteristics

ABSTRACT

Understanding the participation characteristics of VGI (volunteered geographic information) contributors is important as their active participation and consistent data contribution are key to success of any VGI project. Existing studies on this matter focused primarily on deriving and interpreting participation patterns of contributor groups. There is a lack of investigation into the participation pattern of individual contributors, which can be complementary to a comprehensive understanding of VGI contributors’ participation characteristics. Building and using a custom web-based geovisualization framework, this study explores the individual-level participation characteristics of VGI contributors from the perspectives of spatial, temporal, thematic, and social interaction patterns. I conducted geovisual exploratory data analysis on VGI datasets from the iNaturalist biodiversity citizen science project to gain intuitions on the clustering and variabilities of participation patterns in iNaturalist, detect participation pattern shifts over time and form explanation hypotheses, and assess and develop metrics to measure participation. The geovisualization framework is expected to be generally applicable to other VGI datasets for exploring individual-level contributor participation patterns. This work is among the first efforts to explore individual-level VGI participation characteristics through geovisualization and geovisual analytics.

KEYWORDS:

• Volunteered geographic information (VGI)
• volunteer contributor
• participation pattern
• individual-level
• exploratory data analysis
• geovisualization and analytics

Acknowledgments

The author is deeply grateful to the numerous participants of the iNaturalist biodiversity citizen science project for their generous data contributions, which made this research possible. The constructive comments and suggestions from the anonymous referees, which helped improve the manuscript, are also greatly appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

Data used in this research was downloaded from the iNaturalist website at https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/export and from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility website at https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425ef4a7. The geovisualization framework (with data on a small number of selected iNaturalist contributors extracted from the full database) is accessible on GitHub at https://guiming.github.io/GeovizVGI/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Denver through the Professional Research Opportunities for Faculty (PROF) Grant.