Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science Or Volunteered Geographic Information? the Current State of Crowdsourced Geographic Information
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International Journal of Geo-Information Article Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science or Volunteered Geographic Information? The Current State of Crowdsourced Geographic Information Linda See 1,*, Peter Mooney 2, Giles Foody 3, Lucy Bastin 4, Alexis Comber 5, Jacinto Estima 6, Steffen Fritz 1, Norman Kerle 7, Bin Jiang 8, Mari Laakso 9, Hai-Ying Liu 10, Grega Milˇcinski 11, Matej Nikšiˇc 12, Marco Painho 6, Andrea P˝odör 13, Ana-Maria Olteanu-Raimond 14 and Martin Rutzinger 15 1 International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Schlossplatz 1, Laxenburg A2361, Austria; [email protected] 2 Department of Computer Science, Maynooth University, Maynooth W23 F2H6, Ireland; [email protected] 3 School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK; [email protected] 4 School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK; [email protected] 5 School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK; [email protected] 6 NOVA IMS, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL), 1070-312 Lisboa, Portugal; [email protected] (J.E.); [email protected] (M.P.) 7 Department of Earth Systems Analysis, ITC/University of Twente, Enschede 7500 AE, The Netherlands; [email protected] 8 Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development, Division of GIScience, University of Gävle, Gävle 80176, Sweden; [email protected] 9 Finnish Geospatial Research Institute, Kirkkonummi 02430, Finland; mari.laakso@nls.fi 10 Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU), Kjeller 2027, Norway; [email protected] 11 Sinergise Ltd., Cvetkova ulica 29, Ljubljana SI-1000, Slovenia; [email protected] 12 Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia, Ljubljana SI-1000, Slovenia; [email protected] 13 Institute of Geoinformatics, Óbuda University Alba Regia Technical Faculty, Székesfehérvár 8000, Hungary; [email protected] 14 Université Paris-Est, IGN-France, COGIT Laboratory, Saint-Mandé, Paris 94165, France; [email protected] 15 Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Technikerstr. 21a, Innsbruck A6020, Austria; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +43-2236-807-423 Academic Editors: Alexander Zipf, David Jonietz, Vyron Antoniou and Wolfgang Kainz Received: 24 January 2016; Accepted: 18 April 2016; Published: 27 April 2016 Abstract: Citizens are increasingly becoming an important source of geographic information, sometimes entering domains that had until recently been the exclusive realm of authoritative agencies. This activity has a very diverse character as it can, amongst other things, be active or passive, involve spatial or aspatial data and the data provided can be variable in terms of key attributes such as format, description and quality. Unsurprisingly, therefore, there are a variety of terms used to describe data arising from citizens. In this article, the expressions used to describe citizen sensing of geographic information are reviewed and their use over time explored, prior to categorizing them and highlighting key issues in the current state of the subject. The latter involved a review of ~100 Internet sites with particular focus on their thematic topic, the nature of the data and issues such as incentives for contributors. This review suggests that most sites involve active rather than passive contribution, with citizens typically motivated by the desire to aid a worthy cause, often receiving little training. As such, this article provides a snapshot of the role of citizens in crowdsourcing geographic information and a guide to the current status of this rapidly emerging and evolving subject. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2016, 5, 55; doi:10.3390/ijgi5050055 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijgi ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2016, 5, 55 2 of 23 Keywords: crowdsourcing; volunteered geographic information; citizen science; mapping 1. Introduction Mapping and spatial data collection are two activities that have radically changed from primarily professional domains to increased involvement of the public. This shift in activity patterns has occurred as a result of significant technological advances during the last decade. This includes the ability to create content online more easily through Web 2.0, the proliferation of mobile devices that can record the location of features, and open access to satellite imagery and online maps. The literature describes this phenomenon using a multitude of terms, which have emerged from different disciplines [1]; some are focused on the spatial nature of the data such as volunteered geographic information (VGI) [2] and neogeography [3], while others have much broader applicability, e.g., crowdsourcing [4], citizen science [5] and user-generated content [6], to name but a few. Despite their differences, these terms are often used interchangeably to capture the same basic idea of citizen involvement in carrying out various activities relating to geographic information science. These activities can be driven by the needs of a second party such as a commercial company needing to outsource micro-tasks or by researchers who need large datasets collected that would otherwise not be possible using their own resources. Citizens may be motivated to contribute for a diverse set of reasons. The participants involved might, for instance, feel compelled to contribute by a collective cause such as contributing to an open map of the world through OpenStreetMap [7]. Another motivation is simply the desire to share information more widely, by, for example, placing georeferenced photographs online via a site like Panoramio or georeferenced commentary captured via Twitter. Whatever the motivation for collecting and sharing the data, these systems have become important sources of geographical data and are now being used by others for applications that may be unforeseen by the contributors, such as scientific research [8,9]. This adds a new dimension to this rapidly changing field and has led to new terms appearing, such as ambient [8] and contributed [10] geographic information to name but a few. Jiang and Thill [11] would even argue that geographic data contributed by citizens represents a new paradigm for socio-spatial research. Although some papers have clearly acknowledged the existence of different terms in the literature, see for example, [12,13], there has been little attempt to collate these in a single place, examine how they relate to one another or analyze their appearance over time. The first objective of this paper is, therefore, to present a compilation of terms, providing some basic definitions and their primary attributions. The terms are then categorized according to active and passive contributions and to separate out spatial from non-spatial examples of user-generated content (Section 2.1). This is followed by an analysis of the appearance of these terms in the literature (Section 2.2) and for extracting profiles from Google Trends (Section 2.3) to examine their emergence over time in both the academic literature and more popular science outlets. The second objective of this paper is to better understand the current state of mapping and spatial data collection by citizens through a systematic review of different online initiatives (Section3). A similar approach was undertaken within the VGI-net project [14], which was a collaborative undertaking between the University of California, Santa Barbara, Ohio State University and the University of Washington, to classify sites related to the collection of VGI in order to study VGI quality and develop methods for analyzing VGI. The results were reported in Reference [15] and showed that most of the sites were local in extent, appearing after 2005 when Google released its application programming interface, which facilitated online mapping. Moreover, more than 60% of sites were developed in the private sector and purposes ranged from geovisualization to sharing of geographic content. Using the VGI-net inventory of sites as the starting point, a similar review was undertaken here. The sites that were currently still active were retained and new online initiatives were added, which were then evaluated using a much broader set of criteria than used in Reference [15]. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2016, 5, 55 3 of 23 ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2016, 5, 55 3 of 23 were added, which were then evaluated using a much broader set of criteria than used in Reference [15]. These include: the thematic area in which the initiative fell (Section 3.1); the nature of the spatial These include: the thematic area in which the initiative fell (Section 3.1); the nature of the spatial data data collected (Section 3.2); the level of expertise and training needed (Section 3.3); access to the data collected (Section 3.2); the level of expertise and training needed (Section 3.3); access to the data and and metadata (Section 3.4); measures of quality assurance and use of the data in research (Section metadata (Section 3.4); measures of quality assurance and use of the data in research (Section 3.5); 3.5); information about the participants (Section 3.6) and what incentives there were for participation information about the participants (Section 3.6) and what incentives there were for participation (Section 3.7). Based on these findings, Section 4 provides a discussion of the main issues raised in (Section 3.7). Based on these findings, Section4 provides a discussion of the main issues raised in Sections 2 and 3 and provides some suggestions for areas where further research is needed. Sections2 and3 and provides some suggestions for areas where further research is needed. 2. A Review of the Terminology 2. A Review of the Terminology 2.1. Definitio Definitionsns Table1 1 is is a a compilation compilation of of the the different different terms terms that that have have appeared appeared in thein the literature literature to represent to represent the generalthe general subject subject of citizen-derived of citizen-derived geographical geographical information, information, along with along definitions with anddefinitions attributions.