Evaluating reputation in VGI-enabled applications

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is an approach
to crowdsource information about geospatial objects around
us, as implemented in Open Street Map, Google Map Maker
and WikiMapia projects. The value of this content has been
recognized by both researchers and organizations for acquiring
free, timely and detailed spatial data versus standard
spatial data warehouses where objects are created by professionals
with variable updating time. However, evaluating
its quality and handling its heterogeneity remain challenging
concerns. For instance, VGI data sources have been
compared to authoritative geospatial ones on specific regions/areas
in order to determine an average overall quality
level. In user-oriented VGI-based applications, it can be
more relevant to assess the quality of particular contents,
like specific Points of Interest. In this case, evaluation can
be performed indirectly by reputation scores associated with
the specific content. This paper focuses on this last aspect.
Our contribution primarily provides a comprehensive model
and architecture for reputation evaluation aimed to assess
quality of VGI content. On the other hand, we also focus
on applications by discussing two motivating scenarios
for reputation-enhanced VGI data in the context of geospatial
decision support systems and in recommending tourist
itineraries