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

[Christoph Hormann]

I appreciate the renewed interest in the subject and my commentary on 
the term.  Not everyone might have seen that i have written the blog 
post back in 2015.

Thanks for the various pointers to literature dealing with terminology 
of crowd sourced geodata.  Although none of those i have looked at 
takes a deeper critical look at the term VGI itself this is interesting 
read.  Most of this deals with the most obvious limitation of the term 
VGI (more obvious than the problems i pointed out probably) that it 
does not include the meanwhile economically very significant field on 
non-volunteered or non-consciously volunteered crowd sourced data.  
This played still less of a role back in 2015 and it is obviously not 
that significant from an OpenStreetMap perspective but it is clearly a 
problem if you are doing research about both types of data.

What i find interesting in the comments received is that there is very 
little critique of my analysis and arguments in substance and most 
resposes seem to concentrate on justifying use of the term despite 
agreeing with my analysis.  That i would frankly consider 
non-scientific.  For real progress in science you need to question the 
assumptions and preconceptions of your field.  If you use an evidently 
non-fitting or inprecise term because you are used to it, because all 
your peers do so or because an important authority in your field 
(Goodchild) does so or for similar reasons you are not doing that.

Regarding Goodchild's use of the term - it is my impression (which might 
well be wrong) that the point he was consciously trying to make with 
this was to contrast crowd sourced geodata gathering methods based on 
local knowledge of individuals about their personal environment 
specifically with authoritive mapping by government agencies and not 
necessarily to contrast it with all geodata gathering by professionals.  
What i consider the timeless contribution of Goodchild is that he 
picked up on the observations of Estes and Mooneyhan:

https://www.asprs.org/wp-content/uploads/pers/1994journal/may/1994_may_517-524.pdf

about the decline of the overall quality of available geodata and 
suggesting that crowd sourced geodata gathered through digital means 
might help to overcome this problem.  The collection of various 
examples of crowd sourced data collection practically existing at that 
time under the term of VGI - which is what Goodchild is most frequently 
cited for - i would not consider very significant because it is based 
on a snapshot impression of the crowd sourced data landscape back then 
which was extremely volatile and soon after became obsolete.

What happened afterwards, the collective attempt to superficially 
extrapolate this ad hoc invention of a term for the situation at the 
moment into a quickly changing environment over the course of meanwhile 
12 years (which also saw - lets not forget that - the massive raise of 
another significant column of geodata gathering in the form of data 
gathered through remote sensing and automatic analysis of remote 
sensing data) as a buzzword and marketing chiffre, is not something you 
can blame Goodchild for.  What i am not sure about is if the reframing 
of the term VGI from a distinction between crowd sourced data derived 
from individuals' local knowledge by these individuals and data 
gathered indirectly by government agency workers to a professional 
quality data vs amateur fiddlings distinction was already at least 
subconsciously part of Goodchild's use of the term.  But that is 
ultimately not that important.

Again - my hope is that people working in this field take my comments as 
an incentive to reflect on their use of the term VGI and that using it 
in a publication in a non-critical form might ultimately say more about 
your methodological approach to the subject than about the subject 
itself.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/