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The appearance of OpenStreetMap (OSM) in 2004 sparked a phenomenon known as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Today, VGI comes in many flavours (e.g. toponyms, GPS tracks, geo-tagged photos, micro-blogging or complete topographic maps) and from various sources. One subject that has attracted research interest from the early days of VGI is how good such datasets are and how to combine them with authoritative datasets. To this end, the paper explores three intertwined subjects from a quality point of view First, we examine the topo-semantic consistency of OSM data by evaluating a number of rules between polygonal and linear features and then paying special attention to quality of Points of Interest (POIs). A number of topo-semantic rules will be used to evaluate the valididy of features’ location. The focus then turns to the use of geo-tagged photos to evaluate the location and type of OSM data and to disambiguate topological issues that arise when different OSM layers overlap.

Oggi si parla sempre piu’ spesso di “Citta intelligente” o “Smart City, un concetto che non può prescindere da una stretta collaborazione tra cittadini e Pubblica Amministrazione nella gestione dei processi decisionali in ambito urbano finalizzati alla fornitura di servizi sempre più efficienti, ma soprattutto ad un miglioramento delle condizioni della vita e della sicurezza sia del singolo individuo che dell’intera collettività. Il processo partecipativo del cittadino alla gestione del bene comune e in particolare della sicurezza in ambito urbano, è un progetto molto ambizioso che passa attraverso l’instaurazione di un clima di fiducia e di collaborazione tra collettività e Pubblica Amministrazione. Lo scopo di questo studio, concretizzato nella realizzazione di un’applicazione GIS (VGI-DSS) , è la sensibilizzazione del cittadino a partecipare alla gestione del bene pubblico, per la risoluzione di alcune problematiche territoriali nel minor tempo possibile, in considerazione del fatto che egli stesso è attore e spettatore nell’ambito del territorio in cui vive, per cui la sua interazione fattiva e propositiva con le strutture preposte al controllo e alla gestione del territorio può garantirgli servizi migliori e più efficienti nella fruizione del bene comune. Le nuove tecnologie (dispositivi mobili, App e Web Application) e la rete (internet) possono giocare un ruolo fondamentale in questo processo di integrazione consentendo la gestione e la risoluzione di problematiche, in ambito urbano,in modo efficiente, ottimizzando tempi e risorse e di conseguenza limitando e prevenendo danni a persone e cose. Il sistema informativo tiene conto anche del fatto che spesso le Amministrazioni appaltano la gestione di alcuni servizi relativi alla manutenzione del territorio, ad operatori che, in virtù di una reperibilità, devono intervenire e risolvere in tempo reale le problematiche territoriali.

Drawing on John Agnew’s (1987) theoretical framework for the analysis of place (location, locale and sense of place) and on Doreen Massey’s (1991) interpretation of Kilburn High Road (London), the contribution develops an analysis of the notion of place in the case study of Kilburn High Road by comparing the semantics emerging from Doreen Massey’s interpretation of Kilburn High Road in the late Nineties with those from a selection of noisy and unstructured volunteered geographic information collected from Flickr photos and Tweets harvested in 2014–2015. The comparison shows how sense of place is dynamic and changing over time and explores Kilburn High Road through the categories of location, locale and sense of place derived from the qualitative analysis of VGI content and annotations. The contribution shows how VGI can contribute to discovering the unique relationship between people and place which takes the form given by Doreen Massey to Kilburn High Road and then moves on to the many forms given by people experiencing Kilburn High Road through a photo, a Tweet or a simple narrative. Finally, the paper suggests that the analysis of VGI content can contribute to detect the relevant features of street life, from infrastructure to citizens’ perceptions, which should be taken into account for a more human-centered approach in planning or service management.

Thirty five years ahead of the beginning of Open Data initiative, it is appropriate to evaluate the added value of such data and to reflect on how these can be exploited according to citizens’ needs. This paper illustrates some first findings and lessons learnt during a research conducted on the use and re-use of geospatial Open Data by means of Virtual Hubs - an innovative method for brokering of geo-spatial information. Modern applications (APPs) related to topography, mapping of land use but also to historic maps and data of daily importance (including health facilities) are here examined so as to evaluate their thematic field of interest, the requirements of the end-users and the potential added value of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in such context. The study finally evaluates the scale of impact and the level of awareness of developers towards a larger policy framework or their APPs.

City governments around the world are developing and expanding how they connect to citizens. Technologies play an important role in making this connection, and one frequent way that cities connect with citizens is through 311-style request systems. 311 is a non-emergency municipal notification system that uses telephone, email, web forms, and increasingly, mobile applications to allow citizens to notify government of infrastructure issues and make requests for municipal services. In many ways, this process of citizen contribution mirrors the provision of volunteered geographic information, that is spatially-referenced user generated content. This research presents a case study of the city of Edmonton, Canada, an early adopter of multi-channel 311 service request systems, including telephone, email, web form, and mobile app 311 request channels. Three methods of analysis are used to characterize and compare these different channels over three years of request data; a comparison of relative request share for each channel, a spatial hot spot analysis, and regression models to compare channel usage with sociodemographic variables. The results of this study indicate a shift in channel usage from traditional to Internet-enabled, that this shift is mirrored in the hotspots of request activity, and that specific digital inequalities exist that reinforce this distinction between traditional and Internet-enabled reporting channels.

International audience; This paper investigates the causes of imprecision of the observations and uncertainty of the authors who create Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI), i.e., georeferenced contents enerated by volunteers when participating in some citizen science project. Specifically, various aspects of imprecision and uncertainty of VGI are outlined and, to cope with them, a nowledge-based approach is suggested based on the creation and management of “contextualized VGI”. A case study example in agriculture is reported where contextualized VGI can be created bout in situ crops observations by the use of a smart app that supports volunteers by means of both an ontology and the representation of the context of the geo-localization. Furthermore, n approach to cope with both ill-defined knowledge and volunteer’s uncertainty or imprecise observations is defined based on a fuzzy ontology with uncertainty level-based approximate easoning. By representing uncertainty and imprecision of VGI, users, i.e., consumers, can exploit quality checking mechanisms to filter VGI based on their needs.

Telecommunications and geospatial technologies (electronic devices, computers and software, communicating with each other in real time) nowadays form the backbone of urban structures that support the everyday lives of people around the world. Despite their recognized role, little attention has been given to the social and gender impacts of these techno-urban systems, and little has been questioned about how they can be used to foster more inclusive and equitable mobility policies with the participation of communities. On the other hand, mobility is one of the great challenges that institutions face, and research related to gender imbalance in the everyday use of space-time is scarce. Deepening knowledge about mobility and the use of time by women and men in Portugal, the research that led to this article used the methodology of real-time monitoring of a (business) day of workers in order to examine their commuting patterns. To this end, and relying on volunteers, smartphones and/or devices with embedded GPS (trackers) were used for data acquisition. The results demonstrate the feasibility and relevance of the methodology (telegeomonitoring of commuters), highlight gender inequalities in mobility and time use, and help encourage more inclusive social policies and work-life balance tools., Telecomunicazioni e tecnologie geospaziali (dispositivi elettronici, computer e software, comunicanti tra loro in tempo reale) al giorno d’oggi costituiscono la spina dorsale delle strutture urbane che supportano la vita quotidiana delle persone in tutto il mondo. Nonostante il riconoscimento del loro ruolo, poca attenzione è stata data agli impatti sociali e di genere di questi sistemi tecno-urbani, e poco è stato indagato su come possono essere utilizzati per promuovere politiche di mobilità più inclusive ed eque, con la partecipazione delle comunità. D’altra parte, la mobilità è una delle grandi sfide che le istituzioni devono affrontare, e la ricerca relativa allo squilibrio di genere nell’uso quotidiano dello spazio-tempo è modesta. Approfondendo la conoscenza sulla mobilità e l’uso del tempo da parte delle donne e degli uomini in Portogallo, la ricerca che ha portato a questo articolo ha utilizzato la metodologia di monitoraggio in tempo reale di una giornata lavorativa al fine di esaminare i modelli di pendolarismo. A tal fine, e basandosi su volontari, sono stati utilizzati per l’acquisizione dei dati smartphone e/o dispositivi con GPS integrato (trackers). I risultati dimostrano la fattibilità e la pertinenza della metodologia (telegeomonitoraggio degli spostamenti), evidenziano le disparità di genere nella mobilità e nell’uso del tempo, e contribuiscono ad incoraggiare l’adozione di politiche sociali più inclusive e degli strumenti di conciliazione.

There exist many popular crowdsourcing and social services (Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)) to share information and documents such as Flickr, Foursquare, Twitter , Facebook, etc. They all use metadata, folksonomy and more importantly a geographic axis with GPS coordinates and/or geographic tags. Using this available folksonomy in VGI services we propose a logical approach to highlight and possibly discover the characteristics of geographic places. The approach is based on the notion of spatial coverage and a model of tags categorization and on their semantic identification, using semantic services such as GeoNames, OpenStreetMap or WordNet. We illustrate our model with Flickr to retrieve the characteristics (function, usage?) of places even if those places have a small number of related photos. Those found characteristics allow tag disambiguation and can be use to complete the semantic gap on places and POIs such as the function of buildings, which can exist in geographic services.

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) emerged from the widespread of devices featuring GPS and Internet connectivity around the world. It has enabled the easier and increased production of spatial data, and a deeper engagement of people with everything involving location. Such scenario has led to the emergence of Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN), which allow users to be assigned to space related content. LBSN environments have proved to be quite useful, however, keeping users willing to contribute (i.e., maintaining such environments in continuous operation) has appeared to be challenging. In addressing this issue, we have considered applying Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) techniques to produce VGI from social media streams on the Web, aiming to improve LBSN with valuable up-to-date content in an automated way. We rely on GIR techniques such as geoparsing the message bodies instead of considering previously geotagged information since we cannot ensure that an embedded geolocation is the same location that the messages refers to. An artifact for automatically producing VGI based on social media content is described and validated using a real-world case study. We harvested tweets during the FIFA Confederations Cup and tried to produce valuable VGI from the message stream. Our results proved to be promising for leveraging VGI from social media.

For over 100 years, the major glaciers in Italian Alps have been systematically monitored by a varied network of scientists, academics, volunteers and amateurs. Their efforts have produced one of the longest and most valuable collections of glaciological observations worldwide. The format of the field observations and the instrumentation used by the operators have changed widely over the century and this evolution is still in progress. A great geographic variability of traditions and practices adds further heterogeneity to the collections, making extremely onerous both retrieving and consulting all the documents. In this scenario some crucial requirements must be addressed: oto preserve the existent collections and ensure that they will go on; oto normalize and merge them, even enriching them with the scattered resources currently unused; oto promote updated and optimized procedures for enhancing the collection of new observations; oto make the information available for access and analysis. These requirements are very hard to be addressed since they require funding, expertise and a unique reference framework. Recent advancements in information technology let foresee scenarios in which mobile devices and sensors will easy the recording of field measurements, while web processes and applications will facilitate the automatic storage and display of data, while web standards and practices will supply interoperability and common data models. User friendly interfaces and interactive tools could then help amateurs to compile, map and handle additional glaciological information. Besides, the Citizen Science (CS) approach, which is living a flourish phase in the Earth Sciences realm, can help in involving new volunteers in the monitoring activities and in better managing the informative content of their contributions, also known as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). In the present work a system to properly collect and manage the most varied informative contents on a multipurpose web platform is described. It gets its methodological design from the geo-web technological framework and from the CS/VGI approach. While addressing some main constrains that are affecting the Italian glacier monitoring, the proposed system supports spatial and temporal interpretation, and facilitate the collaboration among the different users. Moreover, the compliance to standard profiles and spatial web service guarantees for the effective sharing, re-use and maintenance of the collections over time. This web platform facilitates both the management and the access to measurements, geographical data, images, textual documents, comments and communications. It allows web users to perform searches among data and metadata, to combine the data layers in customized views, to compile and submit new informative contributions. It also serve the coordinators as an administrative console, and help them in performing their supervision tasks.

International audience; Traditionally, national mapping agencies produced datasets and map products for a low number of specified and internally consistent scales, i.e. at a common level of detail (LoD). With the advent of projects like OpenStreetMap, data users are increasingly confronted with the task of dealing with heterogeneously detailed and scaled geodata. Knowing the scale of geodata is very important for mapping processes such as for generalization of label placement or land-cover studies for instance. In the following chapter, we review and compare two concurrent approaches at automatically assigning scale to OSM objects. The first approach is based on a multi-criteria decision making model, with a rationalist approach for defining and parameterizing the respective criteria, yielding five broad LoD classes. The second approach attempts to identify a single metric from an analysis process, which is then used to interpolate a scale equivalence. Both approaches are combined and tested against well-known Corine data, resulting in an improvement of the scale inference process. The chapter closes with a presentation of the most pressing open problems

In questa mia presentazione parlo dei progetti di citizenscience in corso nel nostro istituto di ricerca, ne spiego obiettivi e modalità di impiego; parlo in particolare della VGI, cioè della Volunteer Geographic Information per la quale abbiamo molti progetti in istituto

Spatial data resources have become very important phenomena within the last few decades in Europe. It is especially important in the large cities due to the urbanisation trend. It is expected that till 2040 more than 60% of world population will live in cities. In order to manage sustainable development and support e-governance processes, integration of spatial data is needed in an efficient way. INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Commu-nity) Directive defines the principles for the harmonization of spatial data infrastructure in the European community, including data themes related to urbanistic issues. INSPIRE defines a methodology on how to transform datasets to common data models, but it does not cover the process of data collection and update, because it is out of its scope. Evaluation of the Land Use dataset derived from remote sensing products complemented by field-works has been realized since 2006 by Eurostat within the LUCAS (Land Use and Cover Area frame Survey) project on the European scale. The work presents the methodology to collect VGI observations for land use areas definition based on the LUCAS fieldwork methodology, and HILUCS (Hierarchical INSPIRE Land Use Classification System), and reference top-ological layer. The practical research work was performed during the GIS summer School in the city of Zagreb in dual collaboration by Faculty of Ge-odesy, University of Zagreb and Faculty of Horticulture and Landscape En-gineering, Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra.

Proposal of integration of VGI created by smart applications within an OGC standard geospatial data infrastructure.

U radu se izvještava o studiju slučaja o planiranju i razvoju Platforme utemeljene na informacijama i znanju (Information and Knowledge-based Platform – IKP), čiju jezgru čini Infrastruktura geoprostornih podataka (Geospatial Data Infrastructure – GDI). Platforma je namijenjena podržavanju poljoprivrednog sektora u Lombardiji u Italiji. Glavna novina u ovom radu odnosi se na upravljanje skupovima prostornih podataka i vremenskih serija iz heterogenih izvora podataka. Tijela vlasti omogućuju pristup bazama podataka poljoprivrednih deklaracija, agronomskih katastarskih karata i meteoroloških podataka u stvarnom vremenu. Istraživačke ustanove proizvode skupove geoprostornih podataka i vremenske serije obradom snimaka dobivenih daljinskim istraživanjima, i to multispektralnih optičkih i slika SAR-a (Synthetic Aperture Radar). Konačno, građani i dobrovoljci, kao što su farmeri i poljoprivredni radnici na terenu izvješćuju o opažanjima in situ upotrebom pametnih tehnologija. Tehnološki okvir predstavlja novi pristup upravljanju geoprostornim skupovima podataka i vremenskim serijama heterogenih izvora te integriranoj obradi dobrovoljnih geoinformacija (Volunteered Geographic Information – VGI) u okviru infrastrukture geoprostornih podataka. Rad opisuje prototip IKP-a koji omogućuje ostvarljivo rješenje koje se može primijeniti pri prijenosu tehnologije u stvarnoj provedbi IKP-a u državnim i regionalnim poljoprivrednim sektorima., The paper reports a case study on the design and development of an Information and Knowledge-based Platform (IKP), whose core is a Geospatial Data Infrastructure (GDI). The IKP aims to support the agriculture sector in the Lombardy region of Italy. The main novelty of the present work is related primarily to the management of geospatial data sets and time series from heterogeneous data sources. Authoritative bodies provide access to databases of agricultural declarations, agronomic cadastral maps, and real-time meteorological data. Research institutions produce geospatial data sets and time series by processing and analysing remote sensing images, both multispectral optical and SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images. Finally, citizens and volunteers, such as farmers, or on-field operators belonging to agricultural associations, report in situ observations using smart technologies. The technological framework presents a novel approach related both to the workflow management of geospatial data sets and time series of heterogeneous sources, and the integrated processing of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) within a GDI. The paper describes a prototype IKP, which provides a feasible solution that can be used for technology transfer in the real implementation of the IKP in regional and national agriculture sectors.

It is commonly recognized that free-hand sketch maps are influenced by cogni- tive impacts and therefore sketch maps are incomplete, distorted, and schematized. This makes it difficult to achieve a one-to-one alignment between a sketch map and its corre- sponding geo-referenced metric map. Nevertheless, sketch maps are still useful to commu- nicate spatial knowledge, indicating that sketch maps contain certain spatial information that is robust to cognitive impacts. In existing studies, sketch maps are used frequently to measure cognitive maps. However, little work has been done on invariant spatial in- formation in sketch maps, which is the information of spatial configurations representing correctly the real world. We aim to study such information from a cognitive perspective. This paper first presents basic spatial objects identified in sketch maps and then introduces sketch aspects that capture invariant spatial information. The accuracy and reliability of these aspects were evaluated by a human study. We collected sketch maps from partici- pants, extracted and measured spatial relations of identified spatial objects, and in the end analyzed the accuracy and statistical significance of these relations. Based on the statisti- cal survey, we propose in this paper a set of seven sketch aspects that constitute invariant spatial information, along with a spatial analysis method to measure them. The findings of these aspects help to understand which spatial information is preserved under the trans- formation from the physical world to human sketch maps.

This paper presents a literature review on the methodology called Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and its use for Landslide Risk Assessment (LRA). General risk assessment procedures are discussed and the potential contributions of VGI are identified, in particular when quantitative characterization of factors such as Hazard, Vulnerability and Exposure is required. The review shows that the standard LRA procedures may benefit from input given by surveyors when performing hazard assessments, while crowdsourced data would be a valuable support in vulnerability/damage assessment studies. The review also highlights several limitations related to the role of VGI and crowdsourcing in LRA.

Public lands provide significant environmental, economic, and social values to society across a range of classifications and tenures. Stakeholders representing multiple interests are presumed to hold different management preferences for these lands. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate how stakeholder perspectives can influence place-based management preferences for public lands. We developed a multi-dimensional public land preference scale and used cluster analysis of responses to classify individuals (. n=. 1507) into stakeholder groups using data collected from a large public participation GIS (PPGIS) survey in Victoria, Australia. We analyzed the results of the two largest stakeholder groups (identified as "Preservation" and "Recreation") to assess their spatial preferences for public land conservation, access, and development. We developed a method to assess the level of spatial stakeholder agreement, with the results identifying geographic areas of both agreement and disagreement between stakeholder groups. To determine the effects of unequal stakeholder participation in mapping, we performed sensitivity analysis by weighting the responses of the Recreation stakeholder group to approximate the mapping effort of the Preservation stakeholder group. The place-based management preferences changed significantly for conservation/development and improving/limiting public land access, while preferences for increasing/limiting facility development were less sensitive to stakeholder weighting. The spatial mapping of stakeholder preferences appears effective for identifying locations with high potential for conflict as well as areas of agreement, but would benefit from further research in a range of land management applications to provide further guidance on the analysis of stakeholder group responses that result from diverse stakeholder group participation Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Despite Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) activities are now extremely helpful in a number of scientific applications, researchers and decision makers oppose some resistance to the usage of volunteered contributions, due to quality issues. Several methods and workflows have been proposed to face quality issues in different VGI projects, usually built ad-hoc for specific datasets, thus resulting neither extensible nor transferable. In order to overcome this weakness, the authors propose to perform an user-driven assessment on VGI items in order to filter only those that satisfy minimally acceptable quality levels defined according to their specific quality requirements and project goals. In the present work the users, i.e., information consumers, are seen as decision makers and are allowed to set the minimum acceptable quality levels Thus the approach proposes a user driven assessment of the fitness for use of VGI items. The paper first briefly presents a view on VGI components and suitable quality indices, then it describes a logic architecture for managing them and for enabling a querying mechanism to the datasets. The approach is finally exemplified with a case study simulation.

This contribution discusses the role of VGI created by means of mobile devices connected to the internet to tag observations on the territory and the use of SDI for sharing such information on the Web. Some guidelines are drawn to adopt an open and integrated SDI framework to manage and share VGI and heterogeneous multisource geospatial information, thus achieving interoperability among different information sources and thus making possible a wider fruition of the information available on the Web by the public. Applications supporting agriculture are case study examples of the approach.

Ushahidi es el programa africano de mayor difusión mundial, que permite mapear información vital, desde el punto de vista social, en zonas de catástrofe o de conflicto. Originalmente concebida para reunir las múltiples denuncias de fraude en relación a las elecciones kenianas, ha sido utilizada posteriormente en todo el mundo en centenares de situaciones diversas, generalmente relacionadas con situaciones de amenazas, crisis, ayuda humanitaria, etc. Este artículo presenta el fenómeno Ushahidi y sus aplicaciones, a fin de entender su alcance y sus posibles repercusiones. También se introducen temas de gran interés para el desarrollo humano como el Crowdsourcing, la GeoWeb, la Neogeografía y la Información Geográfica Voluntaria, dada su estrecha relación con el objeto del trabajo. AbstractUshahidi is the African program of global outreach greater, which allows to map vital information from the social point of view, in areas of disaster or conflict. Originally designed to meet the multiple allegations of fraud in relation to the Kenyan elections, has since been used worldwide in hundreds of different situations, usually related to situations of threat, crisis, humanitarian aid, etc. This paper presents the Ushahidi phenomenon and its applications, in order to understand its scope and possible implications. Topics of great interest to human development, as Crowdsourcing, the GeoWeb, the Neogeography and Volunteered Geographic Information, given its close relationship with the object of labor are also introduced.

The relevance of local knowledge in cultural heritage is by now acknowledged. It helps to determine many community-based projects by identifying the material to be digitally maintained in multimedia collections provided by communities of volunteers, rather than for-profit businesses or government entities. Considering that the search and browsing of texts, images, video, and 3D models related to places is more essential than using a simple text-based search, an interactive multimedia map was implemented in this study. The map, which is loaded on a single HyperText Markup Language (HTML) page using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), with a client-side control mechanism utilising jQuery components that are both freely available and ad-hoc developed, is updated according to user interaction. To simplify the publication of geo-referenced information, the application stores all the data in a Geographic JavaScript Object Notation (GeoJSON) file rather than in a database. The multimedia contents—associated with the selected Points of Interest (PoIs)—can be selected through text search and list browsing as well as by viewing their previews one by one in a sequence all together in a scrolling window (respectively: “Table”, “Folder”, and “Tile” functions). PoIs—visualised on the map with multi-shape markers using a set of unambiguous colours—can be filtered through their categories and types, accessibility status and timeline, thus improving the system usability. The map functions are illustrated using data collected in a Comenius project. Notes on the application software and architecture are also presented in this paper.

Social networks and modern age connectivity generate large amounts of data every day. Some of these datasets contain geographical information which could potentially be used to perform spatial or temporal analysis. In this paper a tool is introduced with the aims to allow tempo-spatial exploration on photos downloaded from the photo sharing site Flickr. The tool is built on PHP and JavaScript and uses PostgreSQL as a data store with PostGIS for spatial data processing, WMS and WFS services are provided by GeoServer. The tool first connects to the Flickr public API REST endpoint to download the photos which are related to a specific tag requested by the user. Preprocessing is performed on the downloaded dataset to remove multiple photos that have been taken by the user on the same location on the same day. Cluster analysis is performed on the reduced dataset once for each time unit on a specified study area using the DBSCAN density-based algorithm. Quadrat count analysis is performed by the tool as the last step in the process, giving the user the statistical means to assess the validity of the cluster analysis. The tool is evaluated on the last section of this paper with a case study that uses a dataset comprising photos with the “humpback whale” tag. This dataset is used to find the location of the most popular whale watching spots for four study areas in the North Pacific Ocean. The results are evaluated to assess the spots chosen by the tool.

Spatial data is becoming increasingly important to decision making in all areas of life, affecting all types of businesses and services, right down to individuals throughout our towns, cities and countryside. With the rise of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), government initiatives on making more data ‘open’ and the monopoly of formal spatial data providers, there are now many different choices about what source of spatial data is best suited to a particular task or activity. This paper explores the quality of a VGI data source, namely OpenStreetMap (OSM). It explores various aspects of quality by focusing on a range of Scottish school data, covering three local council areas. The data has been collected from a number of different sources - formal and informal; open and licenced. The aim is to ascertain how the datasets compare to each other, quantify their strengths and highlight any possible weaknesses. The results of this study show that to get a complete picture of schools in an area, no one dataset can be relied on alone. Each one has its positive and negative aspects. If VGI is to truly compete with established formal data providers, there needs to be more encouragement, help and guidance for contributors on adding metadata and attribution to the objects they draw, so that the data has the potential to be used for spatial analysis and research purposes.

The Heat Energy Assessment Technologies (HEAT) project uses high-resolution airborne thermal imagery, Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA), and a Geoweb environment to allow the residents of Calgary, Alberta, Canada to visualize the amount and location of waste heat leaving their houses, communities, and the city. To ensure the accuracy of these measures, the correct emissivity of roof materials needs to be known. However, roof material information is not readily available in the Canadian public domain. To overcome this challenge, a unique Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) application was developed using Google Street View that engages citizens to classify the roof materials of single dwelling residences in a simple and intuitive manner. Since data credibility, quality, and accuracy are major concerns when using VGI, a private Multiple Listing Services (MLS) dataset was used for cross-verification. From May–November 2013, 1244 volunteers from 85 cities and 14 countries classified 1815 roofs in the study area. Results show (I) a 72% match between the VGI and MLS data, and (II) in the majority of cases, roofs with greater than, or equal to five contributions have the same material defined in both datasets. Additionally, this research meets new challenges to the GEOBIA community to incorporate existing GIS vector data within an object-based workflow and engages the public to provide volunteered information for urban objects from which new geo-intelligence is created in support of urban energy efficiency.

International audience; Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) represents a valuable source of information. At the same time this data presents new data quality issues such as credibility. In this paper, we investigate the integration of VGI in Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) systems, which allow analyzing huge volume of geographic datasets. By means of a real case study, we highlight the similarities and differences of these two kinds of systems. We propose a methodology to handle VGI data quality issues during the warehousing and OLAPing phases. In particular, we define a new aggregation ETL operator based on the VGI credibility. We also present a spatio-multidimensional model that provides decision-makers with a general description of the correctness of the SOLAP aggregations.

Ponencias, comunicaciones y pósters presentados en el 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science "Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place", celebrado en la Universitat Jaume I del 3 al 6 de junio de 2014. The agriculture sector is a unique sector due to its strategic importance for both European citizens (consumers) and European economy (regional and global) which, ideally, should make the whole sector a network of interacting organizations. Rural areas are of particular importance with respect to the agro-food sector and should be specifically addressed within this scope. The different groups of stakeholders involved in the agricultural activities have to manage many different and heterogeneous sources of information that need to be combined in order to make economically and environmentally sound decisions, which include (among others) the definition of policies (subsidies, standardisation and regulation, national strategies for rural development, climate change), valuation of ecological performances, development of sustainable agriculture, crop recollection timing and pricing, plagues detection, etc. Such processes are very labour intensive because most parts have to be executed manually and the necessary information is not always available or easily accessible. In this context, future agriculture knowledge management systems have to support not only direct profitability of agriculture or environment protection, but also activities of individuals and groups allowing effective collaboration among groups in agri-food industry, consumers, public administrations and wider stakeholders communities, especially in rural domain. To that end FOODIE project aims at building an open and interoperable agricultural specialized platform hub on the cloud for the management of spatial and non-spatial data relevant for farming production; for discovery of spatial and non-spatial agriculture related data from heterogeneous sources; integration of existing and valuable European open datasets related to agriculture; data publication and data linking of external agriculture data sources contributed by different public and private stakeholders allowing to provide specific and highvalue applications and services for the support in the planning and decision-making processes of different stakeholders groups related to the agricultural and environmental domains.

[ES] Análisis y desarrollo de un complemento basado en servicios web para sistemas de información geográfica particularizado para mejorar la productividad de la producción de información espacial por parte de voluntarios (VGI) mediante mapas de estado., [EN] Analysis and development of software based on web services for geographic information systems focused in increasing the productivity of volunteered geographical information (VGI) using the request-status mechanism.

During rapid-onset disasters, timely dissemination of warning information to the public is crucial. Official emergency information channels are often slow, leaving the public to monitor social media websites for more timely updates. Examining Twitter communications, or tweets, sent during the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire, this research seeks to determine what level of descriptive information is sent through Twitter during a wildfire, whether or not that information can inform other users of changes in fire activity, and how the spatial and temporal information within a tweet can be used in conjunction with geographic information systems (GIS) to determine fire location and activity. This research utilized geotagged tweets and viewshed analysis in GIS as a means of determining what portions of the wildfire are visible from each Twitter user. These visible areas, or viewsheds, were then overlapped with viewsheds from other users to generate shared viewsheds. Both individual and shared viewsheds were compared to the area of new fire growth to determine if burning areas could be more confidently identified by considering different user perspectives. The shared viewshed method showed that while increasing the number of observations does result in a decrease in shared visible area, the portion of the shared viewshed that falls within the fire boundary significantly increases. Many groupings, iv which were compiled based on time sent and ranged in size from two to eight tweets, could see more than 20% of the fire. This research found that there is the potential for users to inform one another of changes in fire activity that may not be visible from different points of view. The addition of viewshed analysis adds another layer of valuable information to the tweets and could be useful if done in real-time, especially during events occurring at a smaller scale.

poster; International audience

Questo lavoro analizza i contributi geografici volontari come parti - colare sorgente di informazione in applicazioni di carattere scien - tifico o professionale, approfondendone la principale criticità: la qualità. Dopo aver fornito un quadro introduttivo, si illustrano le componenti di qualità nelle informazioni geografiche volontarie, si descrivono con schemi ed esempi i principali approcci al controllo della qualità, e si introduce una metodologia per stimare l'efficacia delle strategie di controllo qualitativo sui contributi

National audience; Les entrepôts de données spatiales et les systèmes SOLAP permettent l’analyse en ligne de gros volumes de données géo-référencées. Dans un contexte de gestion des risques naturels, ces systèmes ont été utilisés avec succès sur des données officielles dont la collecte suit un processus bien établi. Le développement récent d’outils collaboratifs pour la saisie de données géographiques, y compris par des utilisateurs non-experts a engendré un nouveau concept : celui de l’Information Géographique Volontaires (VGI), et a créé un besoin et une opportunité pour prendre en compte ces données dans un processus décisionnel. Dans cet article, nous décrivons un modèle et un système patiomultidimensionnel permettant l’utilisation conjointe des données VGI avec des systèmes SOLAP pour l’analyse des aléas environnementaux.

International audience; Research on generalisation algorithms mainly focused on the most prominent themes of a topographic map, namely roads, buildings, hydrography, terrain and land use. Now that many efficient algorithms exist for such prominent themes (Stanislawski et al. 2014), minor themes like ditches (Savino et al. 2011) or swamp patches (Anderson - Tarver et al. 2011) gain interest from the research community. In OpenStreetMap (OSM), the loose specifications resulted in a large range of unusual themes, e.g. electric lines (Figure 1c), and generalising maps out of OSM data requires to handle such unusual themes. Moreover, another particularity of OSM is the very high level of detail that can be found for some features, compared to traditional geographical databases, e.g. airports, port sites (Figure 1a) or parks (Figure 1b). The unusual details contained in such areas also require specific algorithms to preserve the structure and the relations between the components. Generalising OSM data is a challenging task (Sester et al. 2014) but this paper only focuses on the generalisation of those map themes or areas exhibited in OSM.

Prikazani su postupci i metode u procjeni kvalitete Topografske karte u mjerilu 1:25 000 (TK25) u izdanju Vojnogeografskog instituta (VGI) u Beogradu, koji se odnose na prvo izdanje te karte. Sva mjerenja i ispitivanja točnosti obavili su stručnjaci iz VGI-a. Karta kao konačni proizvod bila je otisnuta na papiru na kojem su obavljena mjerenja; izračunata su odstupanja i srednje pogreške za ocjenu točnosti. Obrađene su tri komponente karte: geografska, matematička i likovna. Ispitana je stvarna položajna točnost koordinatne mreže, osnovnih i detaljnih točaka, te visinska točnost reljefa prikazanog izohipsama i kotama. U današnje digitalno doba definirani su elementi kvalitete prostornih podataka o položaju, svojstvima i odnosima pojava u prostoru. Nakon definicije slijedi mjerenje kvalitete prostornih podataka da bi se konačno pristupilo njihovoj analizi i vizualizaciji., This paper presents the procedures and methods used in assessing the quality of topographic maps at a scale of 1:25000 (TK25), published by the Military Geographical Institute (VGI) from Belgrade, which refer to the first edition of this map. All measurements and test accuracy was performed by experts from VGI's. Map as the final product was printed on the paper on which they made measurements, calculate the deviations and mean errors to assess the accuracy. Three components of the map are handled: geographical, mathematical and artistic, and examined the actual positional accuracy of the grid, basic and detailed points, and the vertical accuracy of elevation contour lines and elevations shown. In today's digital era are defined elements in the quality of spatial data on the location, characteristics and the relations phenomena in space. Measuring the quality of spatial data following after definitions, in order to finally approached to their analysis and visualization.