Sketches of Generic Framework for Quality Assessment of Volunteered Geographical Data

The history of volunteered geographical information movement dosn’t have such a long tradition. As was mentioned by [1] Kounadi (2009) in her thesis, a whole movement emerged when Google map API was hacked and the first crowd sourcing services like HousingMaps.com and Adrian Holovaty’s Chicago Crime3 emerged. In general, the whole movement is based as marked by [2] Goodchild (2007) "human is able to act as an intelligent sensor, perhaps equipped with such simple aids as GPS or even the means of taking measurements of environmental variables". Amateur enthusiast start to be cartographers but the difference is that they don’t have much knowledge about the many aspects of map making. Some authors [3] Coleman et al. (2009) even argue that these contributors can be organized in groups from "Neophyte" to "Expert Authority". Everyone can contribute to the Neogeography field but not everyone contributes data of the same quality. The reason for that is a lack of practice and knowledge which can be improved by practice and experience in map making, amazing to see the citation from [4] Andrew et al. (2009) "How such technologies and tools evolve, is not only dependent on advances in technology itself but also the users of such technology". What is interesting when we look generally at an example of OpenStreetMap which is probably now the best and biggest service of volunteered geographical information system in use today but not the only one. If we talk about contributors from my own experience, I have found that knowledge about mapping practices and conventions is spread between people, from the most influential to complete beginners, by good advice and imitation. We, as researchers are interested how this evolution of quality in data my affect a final product map in a system like OpenStreetMap and we are curious if there will be some way for automatic assessment