Part II: Quality: Criteria and methodologiesChapter 5. Handling quality in crowdsourced geographic information (Laura Criscuolo, Paola Carrara, Gloria Bordogna, Monica Pepe, Francesco Zucca, Roberto Seppi, Alessandro Oggioni and Anna Rampini) 57Chapter 6. Data quality in crowdsourcing for biodiversity research: issues and examples (Clemens Jacobs) 75Chapter 7. Semantic Challenges for Volunteered Geographic Information (Andrea Ballatore) 87Chapter 8. Quality analysis of the Parisian OSM toponyms evolution (Vyron Antoniou, Guillaume Touya and Ana-Maria Raimond) 97Chapter 9. Tackling the thematic accuracy of areal features in OpenStreetMap (Ahmed Loai Ali) 113iv
European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic InformationFive years later, in 2012, the ENERGIC action started exploring new VGI sources, sharing and developing data retrieval software, assessing VGI quality, defining standardization criteria for interoperability with other datasets, identifying applications and transferring them for business implementation (market analysis, risk management, advertising, etc. 1 ).The action is based on the study of the remarkable new source of geographic information that has become available in the form of user-generated content accessible over the Internet. People now consume and produce geographic information on the go via platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram and others. The availability of cheap GPS allows everyone to survey and map and contribute to projects like Wikimapia and OpenStreetMap. The exploitation, integration and application of these sources, termed crowdsourced or user generated information, offer to multidisciplinary scientists an unprecedented opportunity to conduct research on a variety of topics at multiple scales.The most popular definition of such content that possesses a geographic reference data is Volunteered Geographic Information ( The growing volume of scientific production on the topic cover multiple domains but some major threads may be identified, although intertwined and often coexisting, to build a narrative on the development of VGI. After an initial phase concerned mostly with conceptualizing and defining the new phenomenon (Coleman 2010; Elwood,2008; Capineri & Rondinone 2011;See et al. 2016;Sui et al. 2012) In conclusion, a very wide panorama which proves the broad penetration of VGI in the scientific community and the diverse research paths.The collection of the papers in this book touch on many of these threads.
The Book StructureThe book includes peer-reviewed chapters, organised in six parts, which try to address some
PART I: Theoretical and social aspectsPart I deals with the nature and features of crowdsourced geographic information: the different sources and typologies of VGI, the fundamental aspect of participation. Capineri (Chapter 2) discusses the main features of crowdsourced geographic information by focusing on the components of such data: the geographical reference, the contents and the producers' profile in order to show the potentialities and crit...