Completeness and Spatial Error of Features in VGI

I have had an interest in volunteered geographic information (VGI) for quite some time (see my publications or blog posts) but only recently have I had an opportunity to look at the spatial error of features within VGI. To this end, our paper entitled "Assessing Completeness and Spatial Error of Features in Volunteered Geographic Information" has just been published in ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. Below is the abstract of the paper along with some figures. Further details about the paper can be seen at the bottom of the page.

The assessment of the quality and accuracy of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) contributions, and by extension the ultimate utility of VGI data has fostered much debate within the geographic community. The limited research to date has been focused on VGI data of linear features and has shown that the error in the data is heterogeneously distributed. Some have argued that data produced by numerous contributors will produce a more accurate product than an individual and some research on crowd-sourced initiatives has shown that to be true, although research on VGI is more infrequent. This paper proposes a method for quantifying the completeness and accuracy of a select subset of infrastructure-associated point datasets of volunteered geographic data within a major metropolitan area using a national geospatial dataset as the reference benchmark with two datasets from volunteers used as test datasets. The results of this study illustrate the benefits of including quality control in the collection process for volunteered data. 

Keywords: volunteered geographic information (VGI); OpenStreetMap; quality; error; point.

Comparison of OSM, OSMCP, and ORNL data.

Various identified locations of Southwest Early College

Full reference:

Jackson, S. P., Mullen W., Agouris, P., Crooks, A., Croitoru, A. and Stefanidis, A. (2013), Assessing Completeness and Spatial Error of Features in Volunteered Geographic Information, ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2 (2): 507-530. Download from here.