Integration of Authoritative and Volunteered Geographic Information for updating Urban Mapping: Challenges and Potentials

A recently published paper provides a bibliometric review between integration of authoritative and volunteered geographic information (VGI) for the specific purpose of cartographic updating of urban mappings. The adopted methodology was through a bibliometric survey of the literature published by Web of Science and Science Direct. The period was evaluated from 2005 to 2020 and the keywords used were: integration of authoritative data, volunteered geographic information, VGI, large scale topographic mapping, Authoritative urban mapping. The number of publications found was small for the topic that deals with this integration, with only 14 articles at Web of Science and 23 at Science Direct. 38% of them were published in the International Journal of Geo Information (ISPRS), 16% in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. 5% were published in the Cartography and Geographic Information Science and the Computer Geosciences respectively. The other 36% is shown in several other journals, approximately 3% each. Regarding the origin of publications, 25% are in Germany (University of Heidelberg), 14% in the UK (Newcastle University), 13% in China (Wuhan University), 11% in Canada (Calgary University), and other countries show percentages between 3% and 5%. Among the research, areas are physical geography, remote sensing, computer science, information science, engineering, and public administration. Among themes addressed in the articles, potentials can be pointed out as existence of models which institutions can implement management of information received collaboratively, existence of several methodologies for quality control of this information so that they can be integrated into authoritative data that are called as data conflation. Methodologies for handling big data and semantic interoperability, as well as automation of processes. This data potential is not only on platforms such as OpenStreetMap, but also on data collected through scraping from social networks such as twitter, sites, and others.

Among the challenges, there are still somethings to investigate regarding consideration of temporal, historic, political, and economic aspects, as well as the consideration of legal aspects. The integration of this volunteered geographic information is necessary, mainly in cities with economic and cultural difficulties to maintain their mapping up to date, as well as the difficulty of accessing information that allows access to authoritative data.

Fernandes, V. O., Elias, E. N., and Zipf, A.: INTEGRATION OF AUTHORITATIVE AND VOLUNTEERED GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION FOR UPDATING URBAN MAPPING: CHALLENGES AND POTENTIALS, Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci., XLIII-B4-2020, 261–268, https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIII-B4-2020-261-2020, 2020.

Selected overview publications (with focus on VGI/OSM quality):

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