Citizen Generated Spatial Data and Information: Risks and Opportunities

The last few years has seen the use of mobile technology become ubiquituos. Many millions of citizens around the world own smartphones, which they use for both personal and business applications. The majority of smartphones are designed towards Location-based Services (LBS). Consequently these smartphones have on-board GPS devices with the ability of locating the user to an accuracy of a few meters. While at the begining of the growth in popularity of smartphones and LBS technologies most users simply consumed services: where is the nearest coffee shop or subway station? Today, citizens are generating spatial data and information at ever increasing volumes. Examples include: georeferenced photographic collections, location-based social networking such as FourSquare, and volunteered geographic information (VGI). VGI is an exciting movement whereby citizens collect spatial data and information about (their own or another) locality. This content is then shared in collaborative projects such as OpenStreetMap, Geonames, Google Maps Mashups, or WikiMapia. This paper explores the risks involved in using this user-generated spatial data and information with specific emphasis on OpenStreetMap. Most citizens are not specialists in geographic surveying or cartography. Our paper provides results of a large case-study of high edit geographical features. We show that user generated spatial data is a very dynamic but has many inconsistencies.