Abstract
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 by numerous contributors will produce a more accurate product than an individual and some research on crowd-sourced initiatives has shown that to be true, although research on VGI is more infrequent. This paper proposes a method for quantifying the completeness and accuracy of a select subset of infrastructure-associated point datasets of volunteered geographic data within a major metropolitan area using a national geospatial dataset as the reference benchmark with two datasets from volunteers used as test datasets. The results of this study illustrate the benefits of including quality control in the collection process for volunteered data.
Highlights
Improvements in communications technology and information availability are having a significant impact on the field of geography as they enable the general public to produce geospatial products for mass consumption on the Internet [1,2]
Haklay used record counts of road segments as a surrogate for completeness, the previous discussion goes on to illustrate how pure count comparisons are insufficient to describe the differences between two point datasets [15]
For the comparison of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to OSM, the matching percentages were somewhat lower as a result of the fact that the OSM data used in the analysis did not contain address information
Summary
Improvements in communications technology and information availability are having a significant impact on the field of geography as they enable the general public to produce geospatial products for mass consumption on the Internet [1,2]. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) [4] is bringing the general public into the realm of map production functions traditionally reserved for official agencies. VGI is following the development of Web 2.0 where users are contributing in more places and more often [5]. Another significant descriptive phrase is ―crowdsourcing‖ which describes VGI in business terms, linking resources and work assignments as suggested by Howe [6]. Brabham describes the approach as using on-line volunteers to solve a formerly internal production requirement of a business or agency [7]
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