Characteristics of Citizen-contributed Geographic Information

Abstract

Current Internet applications have been increasingly incorporating citizen-contributed geographic information (CCGI) with much heterogeneous characteristics. Nevertheless, despite their differences, several terms are often being used interchangeably to define CCGI types, in the existing literature. As a result, the notion of CCGI has to be carefully specified, in order to avoid vagueness, and to facilitate the choice of a suitable CCGI dataset to be used for a given application. To address the terminological ambiguity in the description of CCGI types, we propose a typology of GI and a theoretical framework for the evaluation of GI in terms of data quality, number and type of contributors and cost of data collection per observation. We distinguish between CCGI explicitly collected for scientific or socially-oriented purposes. We review 27 of the main Internet-based CCGI platforms and we analyse their characteristics in terms of purpose of the data collection, use of quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) mechanisms, thematic category, and geographic extents of the collected data. Based on the proposed typology and the analysis of the platforms, we conclude that CCGI differs in terms of data quality, number of contributors, data collection cost and the application of QA/QC mechanisms, depending on the purpose of the data collection.