Volunteered geographic information: future research directions motivated by critical, participatory, and feminist GIS

Abstract

New interactive web services are dramatically altering the way in which ordinary citizens can create digital spatial data and maps, individually and collectively, to produce new forms of digital spatial data that some term 'volunteered geographic information' (VGI). This article examines the early literature on this phenomenon, illustrating its shared propositions that these new technologies are part of shifts in the social and technological processes through which digital spatial data are produced, with accompanying implications for the content and characteristics of geospatial data, and the social and political practices promoted through their use. I illustrate how these debates about VGI conceive of spatial data as socially embedded, and suggest ways in which future research might productively draw upon conceptualizations from participatory, feminist, and critical GIS research that have emerged from similar foundations.

Leveraging VGI Integrated with 3D Spatial Technology to Support Urban Intensification in Melbourne, Australia

“…Core to its conceptualisation is the context in which VGI is used, which is likely to dictate differing priorities in data quality, credibility, role of participant and participant's relationship with formal agencies (e.g. Budhathoki, Nedovic-Budic, & Bruce, 2010;Goodchild, 2007;Elwood, 2008). Participants' motivation for contributing to VGI is often discussed in the literature, where a dichotomy between intrinsic (individual desire and needs) and extrinsic (external validation or recognition) factors is often upheld (e.g.…”

Semantic Interoperability of Sensor Data with Volunteered Geographic Information: A Unified Model

“…Credibility, reliability and quality of VGI are among the main issues being raised [2,[19][20][21][22]. VGI can be perceived as lacking credibility and reliability because it is produced by non-experts in a context that highly differs from the "structured institution-initiated and expert-driven contexts" [2].…”

“…VGI can be perceived as lacking credibility and reliability because it is produced by non-experts in a context that highly differs from the "structured institution-initiated and expert-driven contexts" [2]. For example, while expert geospatial data producers are expected to generate data with a certain level of precision, users of VGI applications are not formally required to do so, and may have an inaccurate or incomplete perception of the geographic phenomenon they describe.…”

“…As this new VGI paradigm is becoming increasingly popular in geographical information science, several researchers have pointed out the problems raised by this new type of information. For example, some argue that the VGI paradigm is likely to enable the production of larger than ever volumes of geographic information [2,3]. In parallel, VGI has significant differences from traditional geospatial data, which are created by specifically dedicated organizations and experts, according to standardized structures and languages.…”

Guest editorial: theorizing the geoweb

“…This need for new approaches has been most saliently articulated in a 2008 special issue of GeoJournal devoted to VGI edited by Sarah Elwood (volume 72 issues 3-4) (Elwood 2008b). Contributors to this special issue highlighted the imperatives of reconceptualizing entrenched notions of 'the user' (Budhathoki et al 2008); attending to the altered contexts of information curation (Flanagin and Metzger 2008); evaluating the effectiveness and appropriateness of existing frameworks-such as Feminist, Critical, and Participatory GIS-for 'reading' or engaging the geoweb (Elwood 2008a;Tulloch 2008); and, devising new metrics and/ or schemes for evaluating the validity and reliability of user-generated geographic information (Bishr and Mantelas 2008;Mummidi and Krumm 2008).…”