Quality Assessment of Volunteered Geographic Information for Educational Planning

Abstract

Volunteered Geographic Information is the term used to describe the process of collecting spatial data using a network of volunteers. The approach collects spatial data to build maps which are often freely accessible. The maps and the underlying data can be used by the public, companies and government agencies for a variety of tasks such as route finding. Given that untrained volunteers may collect the spatial data, questions regarding the quality of VGI have been raised. Several studies have emerged to assess the quality (positional, semantic and thematic accuracy) of VGI by comparing the data to ground truth. This approach fails to capture the quality of VGI for domain specific tasks. In this chapter we examine the quality of VGI for an educational planning task in Islamabad, Pakistan, and show that while the data may be suitable for route finding tasks, they are insufficient for educational planning alone.