Thoughts on assuring the quality of VGI (Goodchild and Li, 2012)

I think that the most important thing to note from Goodchild and Li’s article on assuring the quality of VGI is that his proposed approaches are only applicable to VGI that is “objective and replicable.” This is to say that he is discussing VGI which attempts to capture the truth of a particular geographic phenomena (such as contributions to OpenStreetMap), rather than VGI which references an individual’s particular experience in geographic space (such as a volunteered review of a tourist location). I don’t intend for this post to devolve into a discussion on the nature of scientific “truth” and “fact”, but it is definitely interesting to think about the extent to which any type of VGI (and any type of geographic fact, I suppose) can truly be objective. All volunteered information is subject to the bias of its contributor.

I would have liked for this article to also address the challenges in defining “accuracy” for VGI that is purely objective, rather than fact-based. When we are talking about things like a restaurant review on Yelp or a woman reporting the location of an incidence of sexual assault, what does “accuracy” mean? A restaurant review might be inaccurate in the sense that it could be fabricated by a reviewer who never actually went there, but this is nearly impossible to identify. Perhaps it is the intent of the contributor that is the most important in examples like this (ie. does the reviewer have malicious intent against the particular restaurant?), but underlying intent is still incredibly opaque. Perhaps this is a topic for further class discussion…

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