A taxonomy of quality assessment methods for volunteered and crowdsourced geographic information

Abstract

The growing use of crowdsourced geographic information (CGI) has prompted the employment of several methods for assessing information quality, which are aimed at addressing concerns on the lack of quality of the information provided by non-experts. In this work, we propose a taxonomy of methods for assessing the quality of CGI when no reference data are available, which is likely to be the most common situation in practice. Our taxonomy includes 11 quality assessment methods that were identified by means of a systematic literature review. These methods are described in detail, including their main characteristics and limitations. This taxonomy not only provides a systematic and comprehensive account of the existing set of methods for CGI quality assessment, but also enables researchers working on the quality of CGI in various sources (e.g., social media, crowd sensing, collaborative mapping) to learn from each other, thus opening up avenues for future work that combines and extends existing methods into new application areas and domains.