Abstract
High availability and diversity make Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) an interesting source of information for an increasing number of use cases. Varying quality, however, is a concern often raised when it comes to using VGI in professional applications. Recent research directs towards the estimation of VGI quality through the notion of trust as a proxy measure. In this chapter, we investigate which indicators influence trust, focusing on inherent properties that do not require any comparison with a ground truth dataset. The indicators are tested on a sample dataset extracted from OpenStreetMap. High numbers of contributors, versions and confirmations are considered as positive indicators, while corrections and revisions are treated as indicators that have a negative influence on the development of feature trustworthiness. In order to evaluate the trust measure, its results have been compared to the results of a quality measure obtained from a field survey. The quality measure is based on thematic accuracy, topological consistency, and information completeness. To address information completeness as a criterion of data quality, the importance of individual tags for a given feature type was determined based on a method adopted from information retrieval. The results of the comparison between trust assessments and quality measure show significant support for the hypothesis that feature-level VGI data quality can be assessed using a trust model based on data provenance.
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Notes
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See http://wheelmap.org, for example.
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See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tags for an overview of the tagging conventions the OpenStreetMap community has developed.
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Keßler, C., de Groot, R.T.A. (2013). Trust as a Proxy Measure for the Quality of Volunteered Geographic Information in the Case of OpenStreetMap. In: Vandenbroucke, D., Bucher, B., Crompvoets, J. (eds) Geographic Information Science at the Heart of Europe. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00615-4_2
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