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A Conceptual Quality Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information

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Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9368))

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Abstract

The assessment of the quality of volunteered geographic information (VGI) is cornerstone to understand the fitness for purpose of datasets in many application domains. While most analyses focus on geometric and positional quality, only sporadic attention has been devoted to the interpretation of the data, i.e., the communication process through which consumers try to reconstruct the meaning of information intended by its producers. Interpretability is a notoriously ephemeral, culturally rooted, and context-dependent property of the data that concerns the conceptual quality of the vocabularies, schemas, ontologies, and documentation used to describe and annotate the geographic features of interest. To operationalize conceptual quality in VGI, we propose a multi-faceted framework that includes accuracy, granularity, completeness, consistency, compliance, and richness, proposing proxy measures for each dimension. The application of the framework is illustrated in a case study on a European sample of OpenStreetMap, focused specifically on conceptual compliance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://mcmcweb.er.usgs.gov/sdts.

  2. 2.

    http://www.iso.org.

  3. 3.

    http://goo.gl/W0rmVU.

  4. 4.

    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org.

  5. 5.

    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_editors.

  6. 6.

    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Sophie Crommelinck and Sarah Labusga (University of Heidelberg) for the implementation of the case study, and the OpenStreetMap community for supplying the data.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Spatial Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Andrea Ballatore

  2. Geoinformatics Research Group, Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Alexander Zipf

Authors
  1. Andrea Ballatore
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  2. Alexander Zipf
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andrea Ballatore .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Sara Irina Fabrikant

  2. ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Martin Raubal

  3. School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Michela Bertolotto

  4. University of Winchester, Winchester, United Kingdom

    Clare Davies

  5. Dept. of Geography and Env. Studies, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

    Scott Freundschuh

  6. College of Arts and Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

    Scott Bell

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Ballatore, A., Zipf, A. (2015). A Conceptual Quality Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information. In: Fabrikant, S., Raubal, M., Bertolotto, M., Davies, C., Freundschuh, S., Bell, S. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9368. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23374-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23374-1_5

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