The credibility of volunteered geographic information

Abstract

The proliferation of information sources as a result of networked computers and other interconnected devices has prompted significant changes in the amount, availability, and nature of geographic information. Among the more significant changes is the increasing amount of readily available volunteered geographic information. Although volunteered information has fundamentally enhanced geographic data, it has also prompted concerns with regard to its quality, reliability, and overall value. This essay situates these concerns as issues of information and source credibility by (a) examining the information environment fostering collective information contribution, (b) exploring the environment of information abundance, examining credibility and related notions within this environment, and leveraging extant research findings to understand user-generated geographic information, (c) articulating strategies to discern the credibility of volunteered geographic information (VGI), including relevant tools useful in this endeavor, and (d) outlining specific research questions germane to VGI and credibility.

Spatial Solutions for the Environmental Protection Agency ÐBrownfields to HealthfieldsÓ Program: Utilization of Mixed Methods to Assess Application Effectiveness and Usability

“…Though VGI has many benefits in terms of community participation and bringing individual and underrepresented voices into spatial processes, because it is very much a public process, there will be concerns of quality, reliability, value and credibility [14]. Despite these challenges, there is potential for VGI to provide spatial solutions in a clearly bottom-up approach to data incorporating citizen engagement, and can also help improve the development of descriptive/qualitative rules for determining geographic features of improved data classification [15].…”

The Citizen Science Landscape: From Volunteers to Citizen Sensors and Beyond

“…Although many recognise that citizen science has increased the amount of data that is available, it is a concern that the quality, reliability, and overall value of these data is still preventing its adoption in many research programmes [72]. Assurance of the quality of the data is needed through rigorous scientific methods in order to allow the acceptance of citizen science data into the scientific field [20].…”

Web 2.0 Broker: A standards-based service for spatio-temporal search of crowd-sourced information

“…It is thus reasonable to foresee that huge amounts of georeferenced data will be available in an immediate future. This poses the question whether VGI may be seen as an alternative source of information to complement authoritative data from GIIs (Craglia et al, 2008), so as to improve traditional geospatial analysis and decision support tasks (Flanagin and Metzger, 2008;Pultar et al, 2009) since it provides data at high spatio temporal scales (Zook et al, 2010). Experts and decision makers may even benefit from VGI data in multiple analysis situations such as epidemiology (Aanensen et al, 2009) and geo-demographics (Singleton and Longley, 2009).…”