BACKGROUND Volunteered geographic information (VGI) has strong potential to be increasingly valuable to scientists in collaboration with non-scientists. The abundance of mobile phones and other wireless forms of communication open up significant opportunities for the public to get involved in scientific research. As these devices and activities become more abundant, questions of uncertainty and...

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is a widely used data source in various fields and services, such as environmental monitoring, disaster crisis management, SDI, mapping. Quality critical factor for the usability of VGI. This study focuses on evaluating logical consistency based topological relationships between geographic features while considering semantics. It addresses internal (i.e....

A set of developments within the field of geosensors is to engage citizens to act as sensors, thus providing so-called Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). There is a long tradition of non specialists contributing to the collection of geo-referenced information. Furthermore thanks to recent convergence of greater access to broadband connections, the availability of Global Positioning Syste...

High-quality geographic data sources are eminent for urban data management and the creation of detailed 3D city models. In the past two decades, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) increasingly gained attractiveness to both amateur users and professionals, resulting in a broad availability of urban data within VGI communities and especially OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM provides detailed inform...

Mapillary is a VGI platform which allows users to contribute crowdsourced street level photographs from all over the world. Due to unique information that can be extracted from street level photographs but not from aerial or satellite imagery, such as the content of road signs, users of other VGI Web 2.0 applications start to utilize Mapillary for collecting and editing data. This study assesse...

Participation inequality – the phenomenon that a very small percentage of participants contribute a very significant proportion of information to the total output – is persistent across Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and citizen science projects. It has been identified in both online and offline projects that rely on volunteers’ effort over the past 20 years and, therefore, can be exp...

The idea of outsourcing geospatial data creation tasks to the crowd (volunteered geographic information, VGI) has become quite popular in the field of geographic information science (GIScience). As one approach to VGI, location-based games (LBGs) have been shown to be successful in motivating non-expert users to collect and tag geospatial data. However, the central VGI problem of data quality h...

The proposed contribution describes a methodology we are testing in the framework of an exploratory research project on the contribution of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in the case-study of forest fires. The purpose of the research is to assess the value of VGI at different stages of a fire event. The first step of the methodology focuses on the retrieval of geographical information...

This paper explored the question of how volunteered and professional geographic information (VGI and PGI) can be used together in an outdoor recreation context. In particular, consideration is given to what makes each information source valuable to the user, and how this can be used to help developers of GIS provide more useful, usable and satisfying products. The assumption that VGI is inferio...