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

最近出现的Web 2.0有可能显著改变地理空间数据集的生成方式。虽然数据集主要由政府和行业制图专家制作和分发，但OpenStreetMap等最新工具现在允许任何Web用户为创建大型免费地理空间数据集做出贡献。这种现象被称为“虚拟地理信息”（VGI），最初遭到地图专家的怀疑，但最终导致了数据集的创建，这些数据集在准确性上与政府地图竞争。在过去两年中，国家测绘机构和测绘行业对这一项目越来越感兴趣，因为它可能通过让公民收集、更新或核实地理空间数据，对测绘进程产生重大影响。这种变化的潜在经济影响对于已经价值数百亿美元的世界测绘行业来说是巨大的。除了经济影响外，高质量免费数据的分发可能会产生强大的社会影响，因为它允许在各个领域做出更明智的决定。

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.