With the development of the Web 2.0 era, new technologies and applications have emerged to make it possible for individuals to produce and share geographic information on the Internet. This development is expanding at a high rate, and has received large response from users. Spatial data infrastructure is a framework of policies, institutional arrangements, technologies, data and people that mak...

There has been enormous progress in geospatial data acquisition in the last decade. Centralized data collection, mainly by land surveying offices and local government agencies, has changed dramatically to voluntary data provision by citizens. Among a broad list of initiatives dealing with user generated geospatial information, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is one of the most famous crowd-sourced products...

The primary objective of this study was to examine the quality volunteered geographic information (VGI) data for flood mapping Hurricane Harvey. As a crowdsourcing platform, U-Flood project mapped flooded streets in Houston metro area. This research examines following: (1) If there are any significant differences water depth (WD) among hydraulic and hydrologic (H&H) model, Federal Emergency...

Geographical studies of outdoor activities have increased in recent years with the rise popularity these worldwide, including Japan. Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is a key tool for organizing as it offers means to determine locational and names places. To evaluate quality VGI, geospatial data generated by land survey agencies other VGI are often utilized reference data. However, sinc...

This paper presents several innovative sociotechnical systems currently deployed in some Southern cities, which enable urban citizens to produce and disseminate Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) about their water and sanitation services. What happens to this information once online? The literature review reveals that actual uses of VGI remain relatively unstudied. A comparative and multi...

The number of crisis events around the world has been increasing in the last years and suggests there is a real need to make communities more resilient to them. In addition to providing conventional authoritative data, ordinary citizens and residents in the affected areas are also voluntarily supplying information about the affected areas, in what has been called Crowdsourced or Volunteered Geo...

The quality of volunteered and crowd-sourced spatial data is not in most cases audited prior to being made accessible to end-users. Studies have shown that this spatial data varies significantly in terms of its geometric quality, its semantic consistency, in terms of its comprehensiveness of coverage and in terms of its currency. Subsequently it often compares poorly with the authoritative data...

Digital Earth is a powerful metaphor for the organisation and access to digital information through a multi-scale 3D representation of the globe. Progress made since Al Gore's speech gave a concrete body to this vision. However, this body is not yet self-aware: a better integration of the temporal and voluntary dimension is needed to better portray the event-based nature of our world. We thus a...

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), or geospatial crowdsourcing, is where citizens (volunteers) contribute data and information about the earth and environment that is explicitly or implicitly georeferenced and then disseminated via collaborative projects such as OpenStreetMap or social media such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. VGI popularity is due in no small part to citizens making ...

This paper describes how Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can support automatic information retrieval (IR) from big remote sensing (RS) data on an example of the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL)[1]. Here, the OpenStreetMap 1 (OSM) derived data are used within a satellite imagery processing framework at several stages of an information layer production. Although, we focus on built-up...