Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) systems and their interactions with Geospatial Semantic Web

The proliferation of volunteered geographic information (VGI), such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) enabled by technological advancements, has led to large volumes of user-generated geographical content. While this data is becoming widely used, the understanding of the quality characteristics of such data is still largely unexplored. An open research question is the relationship between demographic indicators and VGI quality. While earlier studies have suggested a potential relationship between VGI quality and population density or socio-economic characteristics of an area, such relationships have not been rigorously explored, and mainly remained qualitative in nature. This paper addresses this gap by quantifying the relationship between demographic properties of a given area and the quality of VGI contributions. We study specifically the demographic characteristics of the mapped area and its relation to two dimensions of spatial data quality, namely positional accuracy and completeness of the corresponding VGI contributions with respect to OSM using the Denver (Colorado, US) area as a case study. We use non-spatial and spatial analysis techniques to identify potential associations among demographics data and the distribution of positional and completeness errors found within VGI data. Generally, the results of our study show a lack of statistically significant support for the assumption that demographic properties affect the positional accuracy or completeness of VGI. While this research is focused on a specific area, our results showcase the complex nature of the relationship between VGI quality and demographics, and highlights the need for a better understanding of it. By doing so, we add to the debate of how demographics impact on the quality of VGI data and lays the foundation to further work.

Integrating heterogeneous spatial data is a crucial problem for geographical information systems (GIS) applications. Previous studies mainly focus on the matching of heterogeneous road networks or heterogeneous polygonal data sets. Few literatures attempt to approach the problem of integrating the point of interest (POI) from volunteered geographic information (VGI) and professional road networks from official mapping agencies. Hence, the article proposes an approach for integrating VGI POIs and professional road networks. The proposed method first generates a POI connectivity graph by mining the linear cluster patterns from POIs. Secondly, the matching nodes between the POI connectivity graph and the associated road network are fulfilled by probabilistic relaxation and refined by a vector median filtering (VMF). Finally, POIs are aligned to the road network by an affine transformation according to the matching nodes. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method integrates both the POIs from VGI and the POIs from official mapping agencies with the associated road networks effectively and validly, providing a promising solution for enriching professional road networks by integrating VGI POIs.

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is geographic information collected by way of crowdsourcing. However, the distinction between VGI as an information product and the processes that create VGI is blurred. Clearly, the environment that influences the creation of VGI is different than the information product itself, yet most literature treats them as one and the same. Thus, this research is motivated by the need to formalize and standardize the systems that support the creation of VGI. To this end, we propose a conceptual framework for VGI systems, the main components of which—project, participants, and technical infrastructure—form an environment conducive to the creation of VGI. Drawing on examples from OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, and RinkWatch, we illustrate the pragmatic relevance of these components. Applying a system perspective to VGI allows us to better understand the components and functionality needed to effectively create VGI.

In Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and more specifically in Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), users can actively participate in the processes of inclusion, change and exclusion of data. Therefore, quality becomes a central issue in these types of application, with the objective of verifying the correctness and consistency of the information, for example. In this context, this paper provides a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the literature on data quality in GIS and VGI, in order to analyze several academic papers related to the topic, examining what quality dimensions are being analyzed and what types of solution are being proposed. In addition, this paper intends to make explicit what themes are recurrent in papers related to the area of data quality and what are the main challenges to be explored by the researchers. For the accomplishment of this work, a research protocol was implemented, which involved following the definition of a group of research questions, used for the subsequent selection and extraction of the data.

Local food systems are increasingly being studied in response to the threats imposed on global agri-industrial food systems. Central to local food is the community who is imaging and implementing diverse and hyper-local food assets, which are making a significant, but largely unknown, contribution to food security, resiliency, and sustainability. It is important to align these assets with broader regional food policies, programs, and regulations. However, there are few mechanisms to engage stakeholders or share local information. One possible mechanism to learn about local food assets is volunteered geographic information (VGI); a phenomenon that blends crowdsourcing, citizen science, and online mapping. It is currently being studied for its ability to engage and gather information from diverse and under-represented groups. This policy-relevant research investigates how VGI can support greater engagement and knowledge sharing across diverse food stakeholders. To achieve this objective, the VGI system framework is established to study the processes that support the creation of VGI. Next, the new era of food mapping, dubbed Food Mapping 2.0, is investigated to understand the impact evolving mapping techniques have on the engagement of food stakeholders. Lastly, the VGI systems framework, which is embedded in participatory geographic information system and participatory action research methods, is applied to support participatory mapping of regional food assets in Durham Region. His research gathered contributions on over 200 food assets in Durham Region – an upper-tier municipality just east of Toronto consisting of eight lower-tier municipalities – effectively capturing the distributed intelligence of government, not-for-profit, and community stakeholders. The crowdsourced data include locations, descriptions, and media related to farms, markets, community gardens, foodscapes, and other innovative food assets. The community identified urban food assets as a central strength of the regional food system. Overall, this project enabled the creation of an open food assets dataset, further supporting the development of an online Food Assets map and a Crowdsourcing Urban Food Assets report, which are collective used to inform future food policy, regulation, and program development. Overall, this research revealed a uniquely local and community-driven perspective about food system assets within Durham, while serving as a prototype of the VGI systems framework.

There have been a lot of geospatial technologies implemented to support disaster management into a more effective way and achieve disaster risk reduction. One of these technologies is the use Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). VGI refers to the volunteered activities by anyone to create geographic information. The recent development of VGI is obviously supported by the development technology itself such as social media, Global Positioning System (GPS) with acceptable accuracy. In addition, it is also supported by mostly unlimited cloud-based storage as well as smartphones. In the phenomena of natural disater such as flood, landslide, earth quake, tsunami, and other phenomena, the need of geospatial data and the availability in timely manner becomes important and crucial at all disaster management aspects. The availability of geographic information is very much critical at the time the disaster occurs compared to normal situation. Therefore, VGI is necessary in supporting near real time information. In this case, VGI has a key role in disaster management particularly to reduce disaster risk.

As the role of information and communications technologies (ICTs) grows, governments have seen the Geoweb and Web 2.0 as an opportunity to increase citizen involvement through e-government which provides citizens with the ability to record and share information. 311 services represent citizens' most direct contact with local governments in the form of volunteered geographic information (VGI) empowering citizens with the means of solving community issues. Past studies have examined VGI and e-government use finding patterns of a digital divide with survey data; yet, further research which allows for the visualization of these patterns using citizen-generated data is needed to understand the link between users and the content they create. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between sociodemographic status and 311 service request frequency in three cities within the United States using geographic information systems (GIS) and regression analysis. Results suggest the potential existence of a digital divide and that the demographic profile of a city plays a role in participation in e-government.

Extremadura (Spain), being one of the less-developed EU regions, is also eligible for European funds, including those related with the development of tourism activities in rural areas. To assess the spatial distribution of rural tourism potential (RTP), a methodological approach was followed by combining the synergetic use of geographic information systems (GIS) and the analytical hierarchical process (AHP). For the evaluation model, six factors were examined and hierarchized by a panel of eighteen experts: tourism accommodation offer, activities in natural areas, gastronomic offer, cultural activities, bath offer in natural environments, and activities in active tourism. These factors were then decomposed into thirty-two evaluation criteria and the relative importance of their weights was estimated using pairwise judgments. Using publicly available data and volunteered geographic information (VGI) platforms, the related spatial and non-spatial data were collected, collated, and standardized, employing appropriate tools developed with open-source GIS software. The results, represented by a series of intensity maps, indicate the RTP scores, highlight the strengths and weaknesses in each county, and could serve as a planning tool for public and/or private investments.

Owing to the rapid development of geospatial and mobile communication technologies in recent years, acquisition of high-quality spatial and temporal information has become much more efficient and cost effective than before. As a result, many researchers deem that data collected by volunteers with little training can be used for scientific researches if carefully designed quality assurance process is performed. In this chapter, we introduce the application of VGI (volunteered geographic information) in spatial humanities. In particular, we demonstrate the procedures for obtaining high-quality spatiotemporal information of various community resources from data collected by volunteers equipped with mobile devices such as smart phones, tablet PC, and GPS (global positioning system) tagger.

Geographic information systems (GISs) based on WebGIS architectures have transformed geospatial data visualization and analysis, offering rapid access to critical information and enhancing decision making across sectors. This study conducted a bibliometric review of 358 publications using the Web of Science database. The analysis utilized tools, such as Bibliometrix (version R 4.3.0) and Biblioshiny (version 1.7.5), to study authors, journals, keywords, and collaborative networks in the field of information systems. This study identified two relevant clusters in the literature: (1) voluntary geographic information (VGI) and crowdsourcing, focusing on web integration for collaborative mapping through contributions from non-professionals and (2) GIS management for decision making, highlighting web-based architectures, open sources, and service-based approaches for storing, processing, monitoring, and sharing geo-referenced information. The journals, authors, and geographical distribution of the most important publications were identified. China, Italy, the United States, Germany, and India have excelled in the application of geospatial technologies in areas such as the environment, risk, sustainable development, and renewable energy. These results demonstrate the impact of web-based GISs on forest conservation, climate change, risk management, urban planning, education, public health, and disaster management. Future research should integrate AI, mobile applications, and geospatial data security in areas aligned with sustainable development goals (SDGs) and other global agendas.

Following last year's successful event, it is a real pleasure to welcome you to the proceedings of the second edition of the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Crowdsourced and Volunteered Geographic Information (GEOCROWD), which include work presented at the workshop in Orlando, Florida. As user-generated content explodes in size, the geospatial domain is especially affected by these large amounts of volunteered geographic information (VGI). Researchers have been quick to realize the importance of these developments and have started working on the relevant research problems, giving rise to new topical research areas such as "geographic information retrieval", "crowdsourcing", "geospatial (semantic) Web", "linked geospatial data", "GeoWeb 2.0" etc. The GEOCROWD workshop was designed to bring together researchers and practitioners from the above areas to discuss open research problems and to develop a research agenda for the future.

The term Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) describes various layperson-based, geo-collaboration projects to collect, maintain, and visualize information. VGI has been successfully utilized in scenarios such as emergency response and is also increasingly integrated into commercial products. Based on an analysis of existing projects and research, we propose to extend the idea of VGI by introducing Volunteered Geographic Services (VGS). Instead of contributing information, volunteers can request or offer microservices to their local community. We provide a flexible server framework that handles service requests and offers. We also implement a smartphone application developed using Google's Android platform. The server and mobile client are realized following the Linked Data paradigm and using Semantic Web technologies. In this paper, we discuss the idea behind VGS, motivate it using two scenarios, and explain the technical realization.

Crime occurrence is an ever-increasing social problem of Tehran city. Crime management for this city requires social action, public participation or community-oriented policing. In this regard, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) systems can be of great support to community policing efforts. By employing such systems, members of the society can act as active, intelligent, responsible, location-aware, mobile, and distributed sensors in order to monitor and report local crimes and generate crime data. Analysis of such data can be substantially helpful in crime management within Tehran. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop a VGI-based system as a means for crime management in District # 22 of Tehran. Using this system, citizens and police departments can accurately report and analyze various information such as precise location, type, photo, date and time. Citizens’ feedbacks indicate that the system is easy-to-use (highly 55%, very highly 31%), suitable for reporting and presenting crime data (highly 90%) and reducing crime rates (highly 40%, very highly 35%), all the while providing an attractive user interface (highly 25%, moderately 45%). However, most citizens stated that the system is highly dependent in its need for prior knowledge (highly 75%). On the other hand, evaluation results by police departments show that the system facilitates the entire crime management process.

Background Various applications have been developed worldwide to contain and to combat the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic. In this context, spatial information is always of great significance. The aim of this study is to describe the development of a Web GIS based on open source products for the collection and analysis of COVID-19 cases and its feasibility in terms of technical implementation and data protection. Methods With the help of this Web GIS, data on this issue were collected voluntarily from the Cologne area. Using house perimeters as a data basis, it was possible to check, in conjunction with the Official Topographic Cartographic Information System object type catalog, whether buildings with certain functions, for example residential building with trade and services, have been visited more frequently by infected persons than other types of buildings. In this context, data protection and ethical and legal issues were considered. Results The results of this study show that the development of a Web GIS for the generation and evaluation of volunteered geographic information (VGI) with the help of open source software is possible. Furthermore, there are numerous data protection and ethical and legal aspects to consider, which not only affect VGI per se but also affect IT security. Conclusions From a data protection perspective, more attention needs to be paid to the intervention and post-processing of data. In addition, official data must always be used as a reference for the actual spatial consideration of the number of infections. However, VGI provides added value at a small-scale level, so that valid information can also be reliably derived in the context of health issues. The creation of guidelines for the consideration of data protection, ethical aspects, and legal requirements in the context of VGI-based applications must also be considered. Trial registration The article does not report the results of a health care intervention for human participants.

This paper discusses the use of spatial data for risk and natural disaster management. The importance of remote-sensing (RS), Geographic Information System (GIS) and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data is stressed by comparing studies of the use of these technologies for natural disaster management. Spatial data sharing is discussed in the context of the establishment of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) for natural disasters. Some examples of SDI application in disaster management are analyzed, and the need for participation from organizations and governments to facilitate the exchange of information and to improve preventive and emergency plans is reinforced. Additionally, the potential involvement of citizens in the risk and disaster management process by providing voluntary data collected from volunteered geographic information (VGI) applications is explored. A model relating all of the spatial data-sharing aspects discussed in the article was suggested to elucidate the importance of the issues raised.