Global online maps are an important tool and data sets such for such maps are normally provided by commercial providers or public authorities. Nevertheless, the ever expanding trend of collaboratively collected geodata by hobbyists, namely Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), increases regarding both data quantity and quality. Therefore, VGI can be considered as a real alternative data sou...

Recent advances in spatial data collection technologies and online services dramatically increase the contribution of ordinary people to produce, share and use geographic information. Collecting spatial data and disseminating them on the internet by citizens has led to a huge source of spatial data termed as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) by Mike Goodchild. Despite the advantages of V...

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...

Volunteers are the key component in the collection of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), so what motivates their participation, what strategies work in recruitment and how sustainability of participation can be achieved are key questions that need to be answered to inform VGI system design and implementation. This chapter reviews studies that have examined these questions and presents th...

The combination of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) with remote sensing classification techniques is addressed rarely, yet has masses of potential in the domain of improving data collection and annotation for environmental monitoring. This position paper delineates the benefits of using VGI within ecological research and identifies key research challenges in gathering ecologically robus...

The assessment of the quality and accuracy of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) contributions, and by extension the ultimate utility of VGI data has fostered much debate within the geographic community. The limited research to date has been focused on VGI data of linear features and has shown that the error in the data is heterogeneously distributed. Some have argued that data produced b...

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...