Designing methods for evaluating and communicating the quality of volunteered geographic information

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The recent emergence of the Web 2.0 has the potential to significantly change the way geospatial datasets are produced. While datasets were largely produced and distributed by government and industry mapping experts, recent tools such as OpenStreetMap now allow any Web user to contribute to the creation of large free geospatial datasets. This phenomenon, described as "Volunteered Geographic Information" (VGI), faced an initial skepticism among mapping experts but led to the creation of datasets that compete in accuracy with government maps. This generated in the past two years an increasing interest from National Mapping Agencies and the mapping industry as it could potentially have a major impact on mapping processes, by having citizens collecting, updating or verifying geospatial data. The potential economic impact of such change is huge for a world mapping industry which is already valued at tens of billions of $US. Beyond the economic impact, the distribution of high-quality free data is likely to have strong social impacts by allowing more informed decisions to be made in various fields.