Trusting crowdsourced geospatial semantics

Abstract

The degree of trust one can place in information is one of the foremost limitations of crowdsourced geospatial information. As with the development of web technologies, the increased prevalence of semantics associated with geospatial information has increased accessibility and functionality. Semantics also provides an opportunity to extend indicators of trust for crowdsourced geospatial information that have largely focused on spatio-temporal and social aspects of that information. Comparing a feature's intrinsic and extrinsic properties to associated ontologies provides a means of semantically assessing the trustworthiness of crowdsourced geospatial information. The application of this approach to unconstrained semantic submissions then allows for a detailed assessment of the trust of these features whilst maintaining the descriptive thoroughness this mode of information submission affords. The resulting trust rating then becomes an attribute of the feature, providing not only an indication as to the trustworthiness of a specific feature but is able to be aggregated across multiple features to illustrate the overall trustworthiness of a dataset.