Researching Volunteered Geographic Information: Spatial Data, Geographic Research, and New Social Practice

Sarah Elwood et al. wrote a fundamental paper about Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) from aspects of definition(s) of the VGI, domains researches of VGI, frameworks within or beyond the VGI, impact of VGI on spatial data infrastructure and geographic researches, quality issues of VGI data and concerning methodologies. VGI does contribute to the data explosion nowadays and expand the research contents in new fields, but there still plenty of issues exist confronted with creation and application of VGI data. I am really interested in the quality issues of VGI data which I think is the most important issue when conducting researches using VGI data though there are a host of situations when VGI is beneficial even if the quality is hard to assess. The authors do point out four aspects of insights concerning the quality issue in VGI that it is quite different from the traditional data qualities, however, I am still curious about how to deal with those difference and difficulties in uncertainty and inaccuracy of the VGI data. How could new developed AI technologies help in determining the basic quality assessment rules when filtering useful information? And I think education in geography would be really helpful for further better developing the high quality VGI system.

Moreover, it is argued that VGI is a paradigmatic shift of data collection, creation and sharing in GIS. Does that mean the traditional types of data like raster, vector, object based, etc. would be changing forced by the development of VGI? Also, Web plays an important role in VGI and does that mean VGI would not be developing independent of WebGIS, so what is the relationship between WebGIS and VGI (both would be presented next week)?

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