35 - VGI and Beyond: From Data to Mapping

In a seminal paper published in 2007, Mike Goodchild coined the term Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in an effort to describe ‘the widespread engagement of large numbers of private citizens, often with little in the way of formal qualifications, in the creation of geographic information’ (Goodchild, 2007: 217). At that point, rudimentary crowdsourced Geographic Information (GI) was created and disseminated freely with the help of innovative desktop applications (e.g. Google Earth) or web-based platforms (e.g. Wikimapia, OpenStreetMap). By crowdsourcing we refer to the action of multiple participants (sometimes thousands or even millions) in the generation of geographical information, when these participants are external to the organization that manages the information and are not formally employed by it. Since then a lot has changed and VGI now has a deep and broad agenda that ranges from implicitly contributed GI through social networks to rigorously-monitored citizen science projects. However, before we continue the discussion on this subject, it is necessary to shed light onto the key factors that have helped to create this phenomenon.