We invite anybody interested to the following open talk in our GIScience colloquium series this Monday:
Volunteered geographic (mis)information? Measuring quality in crowdsourced maps
Dr. Andrea Ballatore
Dept of Geography, Environment and Development Studies Birkbeck, University of London
Lecturer in GIS and Big Data Analytics
Mon, June 27, 2016, 2.15 pm,
Institute of Geography, Heidelberg University, INF 348, Lecture Hall (Room 015)
The assessment of the quality of volunteered geographic information (VGI) is cornerstone to understand the fitness for purpose of data in many application domains. While most analyses focus on geometric and positional quality, little 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 this dimension of quality in VGI and provide useful indicators to users and contributors, it is necessary to devise and test measures for conceptual accuracy, granularity, completeness, consistency, compliance, and richness. This framework is currently being implemented on OpenStreetMap, with plans for extension on Wikimapia.
Related Work:
Ballatore, A. and Zipf, A. (2015): A Conceptual Quality Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information. COSIT – CONFERENCE ON SPATIAL INFORMATION THEORY XII. October 12-16, 2015. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 89–107.
