Specifications for user generated spatial content

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of quality in the context of collaborative edition of spatial content. The overall approach is grounded on the definition of explicit and adequate specifications for such content, i.e. the data model, the conceptual model, conventions for data acquisition, possible integrity constraints, possible relationships with external reference data. Explicit specifications could be processed to automatically check when different users simultaneously contribute on the same area. Their definition requires expertness, firstly, to ensure spatial content consistency and, secondly, to establish relevant relationships with external reference data. Designing these specifications is not an easy task for contributors. Hence, the focus of this paper is to assist them in this task. We propose a generic process to automatically produce specification items such as feature types, attribute types, and relationship types, including possible relationship types with external reference data from a set of keywords. It exploits information from two different kinds of existing contents: user generated content (like Wikipedia) and more conventional content (like WordNet and NMA databases). It has been applied to keywords found in existing user generated spatial contents. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.