Thoughts on VGI

With the development of the Internet, volunteered geographic formation played a more a more important role in not only geographic information science, but also human geography, human geography, and geographic education. But I noticed that the author emphasizes explicitly about the importance of the volunteer part. The author thinks that in order to be referred to as VGI, the people who involve in this should know that that are doing it voluntarily but not passively. Then this leaves me a question, then where should we categorize the data that are generated passively?

Besides, the author also mentioned that no one can guarantee the data quality of VGI data. Then I think it would be a big problem especially when researchers are using the data to make some critical decisions. Data uncertainty problem are always important no matter in what discipline. The data quality of VGI data, however, are extra harder to evaluate because it is volunteered, and they are collected and analyzed by different groups of people with different background. So, my question is that is there any way that researchers can at least take the data uncertainty problem into consideration when they are using it. The characteristics of the VGI data made it even harder to use regular ways to evaluate the data quality.

Another point is the author mentioned that there is some connection between Geospatial web and VGI, but he didn’t explain it. I’m very curious that is there any examples or explanation of it.

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