An assessment of several taxonomies of volunteered geographical information

Abstract

User-generated content (UGC) in general, and volunteered geographical information (VGI) in particular, are becoming more important as sources for official data bases, such as those used in national spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). Discovering and assessing VGI as suitable geospatial resources for one’s purposes is hence becoming more important, but can be difficult. One way of assessing VGI resources is by classifying them into different types of resources, i.e. a taxonomy of resources. The question is whether such taxonomies can accurately identify suitable VGI resources. We assess five taxonomies both subjectively and using formal concept analysis to determine their discrimination adequacy, that is, how well the taxonomies discriminate between repositories containing UGC in general, or VGI in particular.