A volunteered geographic information-based environmental decision support system for waste management and decision making

Abstract

The need for in-depth and fast observation of waste pollutions, increase in public concerns on environmental pollution and the effect of polluted environment on the physical and mental health of people have led to participatory environmental monitoring and protection. Citizens can act as volunteer, interactive, group, logical, smart, responsible, mobile, and dispersed observers/sensors to constantly monitor their surroundings and provide real-time data of waste pollutions that are not easily remotely sensed. The concept of volunteered geographic information (VGI) can be adopted as an effective phenomenon for participatory collection of environmental pollution data. However, the research problem is how to effectively use these citizen-contributed or volunteered information for waste management analyses and decision-making processes. Consequently, the objective of the present study is to develop a VGI-based environmental decision support tool that facilitates direct involvement of the public in generating waste pollution data and provides appropriate GIS-MCDA (multicriteria decision analysis) analytical tools for waste management and decision making using the citizen-contributed data. A web-based prototype of the decision support system was developed to demonstrate the practical feasibility, applicability and some functionalities of the system for pollution-related decision analyses.