International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, Vol 5 (2010)

Addressing vagueness in Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) – A case study

Bertrand De Longueville, Nicole Ostländer, Carina Keskitalo

Abstract


The stakeholders that are directly affected by the climate change might become an invaluable source of information if their perceptions are shared with the general public and the scientific community. Such Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) about environmental phenomena have however a certain degree of vagueness, as they describe only a spatiotemporal and thematic snapshot of the entire phenomenon. To reconcile vagueness of stakeholder’s perception of environmental phenomenon with the ‘crisp objects’ vision of current VGI, we propose a hybrid strategy, combining an Open Gazetteer approach, and the concept of Degree of Truth. On this basis, we describe eVGI, an innovative web application based on a service-oriented architecture. We implemented eVGI as a prototype, addressing a real-world case study implying stakeholders from forestry, fishing and reindeer husbandry sectors in the Barents region.