Data and Metadata Management for Better VGI Reusability

Abstract

The rapid expansion of citizen science projects and crowdsourcing applications is yielding a huge and varied pool of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) on a wide variety of themes. This VGI may be of huge value for institutions, individuals and decision-makers, but only if it can be discovered, evaluated for quality and fitness-for-purpose and combined with data from other sources. If VGI data are to be discovered, used and reused to their full potential, they must be actively managed. In this chapter we assess the current state of the art regarding data management practices in VGI, identify some challenges, obstacles and best-practice examples, and review a range of developing and established open source technologies which can underpin robust and sustainable data management for VGI. We conclude that VGI is likely to remain patchy and heterogeneous and that existing standards may not be exploited to their full potential. Nevertheless, automated support for documenting the generation and use of VGI, as well as annotations following the Linked Data paradigm, can help to improve interoperability and reuse. We were able to identify good practices within different existing systems, but more research and development work is needed in order to support their joint application for the benefit of VGI. New data management methodologies can only succeed if their benefits (for example, simplifying administration or lowering the entry barrier to data publication) exceed the implementation costs.