Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) represents a growing source of potentially valuable data for many applications, including land cover map validation. It is still an emerging field and many different approaches can be used to take value from VGI, but also many pros and cons are related to its use. Therefore, since it is timely to get an overview of the subject, the aim of this article is...

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...

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) features a specific type of “user-generated content" that involves spatial data. Geobrowsers are environments that present spatial data dynamically and can be accessed through a compatible browser. A Geobrowser can own a collaborative Web system to collect VGI. This paper presents the ClickOnMap, a framework to develop collaborative environments in Geobr...

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has been used to complement or substitute authoritative data in flood management domain. The main issue regarding the use of volunteered information is to estimate its quality, mainly because it may suffer from heterogeneous quality. Therefore, several methods have been developed in the past few years in order to assess VGI quality. However, existing wor...

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is a growing area of research. This Special Issue aims to capture the main trends in VGI research based on 16 original papers, and distinguishes between two main areas, i.e., those that deal with the characteristics of VGI and those focused on applications of VGI. The topic of quality assessment and assurance dominates the papers on VGI characteristics, ...

The crowdsourced collection of geographic information (Volunteered Geographic Information VGI) has moved to the center of the research agenda in Web technologies and GIS. Much of the current VGI research is tightly coupled with issues related to the quality of the collected geodata and possible conflation or comparison with other official sources of geodata. This paper presents research which a...

The widespread use of GPS-equipped devices such as smartphones and tablets and the easy handling of online maps are simplifying the production and dissemination of volunteered geographic information (VGI) through the internet. VGI systems collect and distribute this type of information and can be used, for example, in cases of natural disasters, mapping, city management, etc. In some cases, the...

Crowdsourcing and volunteered geographic information (VGI) can improve the way we collect information about the world we live in, but they are not without limitations. Traditionally sourced geographic information (GI) is implicitly trusted due to the authority of its source, whereas VGI often lacks trust. The lack of trust in VGI stems from the very nature of crowdsourcing where many sources of...

High-quality geographic data sources are eminent for urban data management and the creation of detailed 3D city models. In the last 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...

The increasing volume of Volunteered Geo-information (VGI) often remains hidden and unconnected to other sources of information, and therefore hampering its reuse. A better understanding of the semantics behind VGI and its resources can relieve this issue, facilitated by the use of lightweight Semantic Web tools for the visualization, exploration and querying of Linked Data. The support of the ...