VGI Edit History Reveals Data Trustworthiness and User Reputation

Abstract

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is an approach to crowdsource information about geospatial features around us. People around the world are engaged with typing in their observations about the world (like locations of shops, cafeterias), or to semi-automatically gather them with mobile devices (like hiking paths or roads). In this process people might make mistakes, for instance assign misleading tags to features or provide over simplistic boundaries for features. In this paper we study what kinds of things might contribute to assess trustworthiness of data, and reputation of contributors for VGI. We present a model for analysing the different factors, and a method for automatically creating the trust and reputation scores.