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。虽然数据集在很大程度上是由政府和行业地图专家制作和分发的，但最近的工具，如OpenStreetMap，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。这种现象被描述为“自愿提供地理信息”(VGI)，最初受到地图专家的质疑，但导致了与政府地图在准确性上竞争的数据集的创建。在过去两年里，这引起了国家测绘机构和测绘行业越来越大的兴趣，因为这可能会对测绘进程产生重大影响，因为公民可以收集、更新或核实地理空间数据。对于一个已经价值数百亿美元的世界地图行业来说，这种变化的潜在经济影响是巨大的。除了经济影响，分发高质量的免费数据还可能产生强大的社会影响，因为它使人们能够在不同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.