An Integrated Quality Score for Volunteered Geographic Information on Forest Fires

The paper presents the most recent developments in an exploratory research project that investigates the potential utility of volunteered geographic information (VGI) for fighting forest fires. As social media platforms change the way people communicate and share information in crisis situations, we focus on the value and options to integrate VGI with existing spatial data infrastructures (SDI) and crisis response procedures. Two major obstacles to using VGI in crisis situations are (1) a lack of quality control and (2) an increasing amount of information. Consequently, the overall quality and fitness-for-use of VGI needs assessment first. One year ago, we proposed a workflow for automatically processing and assessing the quality and the accuracy of VGI in the context of forest fires. This contribution presents the advancements since then, focusing on the approach to define and implement a measure of the overall quality/fitness-for-use of the content analyzed. A proposed integrated quality score (IQS) consists of two main criteria, i.e. relevance and credibility. For both criteria, we have identified several contributing components. The geographic context of a message has crucial significance, since we argue that it allows assessing both relevance and credibility. However, the geographic context is difficult to establish, since a single piece of VGI can contain multiple types of geographic references, each of varying quality itself.

OSTERMANN Frank;  SPINSANTI Laura; 

2011-12-01

Publications Office of the European Union

JRC67317

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC67317,   

10.2788/74875,