Volunteered geographic information and data quality - the case of social reporting

Content created by internet users and enriched with geographical footprints is usually referred to as Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI; Goodchild 2007). This new source of information enables the collection of rich data sets that often outperform the data collected by private companies and government agencies in terms of the amount of data producers and their personal motivation to contribute (Goodchild 2008, Goodchild and Glennon 2010). In spite of the potential of VGI, user-generated data production is often accompanied by problems that have to be overcome to ensure usable and valuable data sets. Four main challenges were identified in literature, namely the motivation of users to contribute, the quality of the resulting data and the spatial and temporal coverage of the latter (Coleman et al. 2009, Feick & Roche 2013, Flanagin & Metzger 2008). This work studies the issue of data quality in the different stages of VGI data creation, collection and evaluation. It concentrates on social reporting scenarios, in which citizens submit geotagged reports about observations of real-world-events. The following basic research questions are addressed within this work: