Understanding the roles of communities in volunteered geographic information projects

Abstract

As a society we are now more connected than ever before. Citizens interact with each other and form virtual communities based on a common interest or being involved in certain cultural, political, intellectual, or other issues. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is generated when citizens annotate content from social media and smart devices. OpenStreetMap is a famous example of a VGI project with a very large community of contributors. This chapter examines this community and investigates the types of contributors and interactions amongst members of OSM. Our results show that there are very small groups of individuals creating and editing over 85 % of all OSM objects in three case-study cities. Editing and contribution behaviour is mostly steady and consistent over time except during months where OSM ‘mapping parties’ occur or when freely available spatial data is bulk imported into OSM. The paper also provides results of analysis into the social interaction between contributors to OSM where we show that a very small number of contributors are actively editing and maintaining the data submitted by other contributors. This indicates that most contributors work exclusively on their own data and rarely edit the work of others. Overall this paper will be of interest to LBS practitioners considering using OSM as a source of spatial data for LBS applications.