"Volunteered Geography"
Michael Goodchild has an article in GeoJournal on the phenomenon of everyday folks creating and publishing geospatial data through websites like Google Maps. He calls it "volunteered geographic information."
The article -- Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography -- is not available for free on-line. A news release about the article from Springer, publisher of GeoJournal, gives an idea of some of the concepts Mr. Goodchild explores, and a statement of his conclusion:
The article -- Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography -- is not available for free on-line. A news release about the article from Springer, publisher of GeoJournal, gives an idea of some of the concepts Mr. Goodchild explores, and a statement of his conclusion:
He concludes that “collectively volunteered geographic information represents a dramatic innovation that will certainly have profound impacts on geographic information systems and more generally on the discipline of geography and its relationship to the general public.”Update: Many thanks to commenter "phantomplanet" who has provided a link to the full article in PDF format.
Labels: data correction, google, public
posted by Mike Mahaffie at 10:12 PM
2 Comments:
The link is actually here.
The more broadly used term has been "User-Generated Content". "Volunteered" implies that the users were contributing to a greater cause, whereas many of the placemarking sites typically cater to someone marking their personal locations, travels, spots, without necessarily building a comprehensive community database.
However, if there could be a distinction where UGC would be someone marking their personal locations, but VGI would be something like OpenStreetMap that is actually built on "crowd-sourced", or volunteered information.
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