[OSM-Science] Special Issue on "Advances in Applications of Volunteered Geographic Information" in the journal Remote Sensing

[Andrew Davidson]

On 7/8/19 01:42, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> 
> http://blog.imagico.de/science-and-openstreetmap-and-why-not-call-it-vgi/
> 

The term VGI seems to come from a paper written in 2007 by Michael 
Goodchild (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-007-9111-y). According to 
Google Scholar it now has over 4000 citations.

Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall but it might be worth 
quoting the section in which VGI is defined:

"Nevertheless, the events of 1507 provide an early echo of a remarkable 
phenomenon that has become evident in recent months: the widespread 
engagement of large numbers of private citizens, often with little in 
the way of formal qualifications, in the creation of geographic 
information, a function that for centuries has been reserved to official 
agencies. They are largely untrained and their actions are almost always 
voluntary, and the results may or may not be accurate. But collectively, 
they represent a dramatic innovation that will certainly have profound 
impacts on geographic information systems (GIS) and more generally on 
the discipline of geography and its relationship to the general public. 
I term this volunteered geographic information (VGI), a special case of 
the more general Web phenomenon of user-generated content, and it is the 
subject of this paper."

I found it interesting that the examples of VGI given in the paper (and 
the order that they were given) were:

1. Wikimapia ("One of the more compelling examples of VGI")
2. Flickr
3. MissPronouncer
4. OpenStreetMap
5. Google Earth mash-ups

Which shows us how much the field has changed over the last 12 years.