Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge: Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in Theory and Practice

Situating volunteered geographic information (VGI) in today’s landscape of ‘big-data deluge’, this book tackles core topics in crowdsourcing for VGI, such as citizen science and producing geographic knowledge, and evaluates emerging techniques and challenges.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Volunteered Geographic Information, the Exaflood, and the Growing Digital Divide

Part I: Public Participation and Citizen Science
Chapter 2: Understanding the Value of VGI
Chapter 3: To Volunteer or to Contribute Locational Information? Towards Truth in Labeling for Crowdsourced Geographic Information
Chapter 4: Metadata Squared: Enhancing Its Usability for Volunteered Geographic Information and the GeoWeb
Chapter 5: Situating the Adoption of VGI by Government
Chapter 6: When Web 2.0 Meets Public Participation GIS (PPGIS): VGI and Spaces of Participatory Mapping in China
Chapter 7: Citizen Science and Volunteered Geographic Information: Overview and Typology of Participation

Part II: Geographic Knowledge Production and Place Inference
Chapter 8: Volunteered Geographic Information and Computational Geography: New Perspectives
Chapter 9: The Evolution of Geo-Crowdsourcing: Bringing Volunteered Geographic Information to the Third Dimension
Chapter 10: From Volunteered Geographic Information to Volunteered Geographic Services
Chapter 11: The Geographic Nature of Wikipedia Authorship
Chapter 12: Inferring Thematic Places from Spatially Referenced Natural Language Descriptions
Chapter 13: “I Don’t Come from Anywhere”: Exploring the Role of the Geoweb and Volunteered Geographic Information in Rediscovering a Sense of Place in a Dispersed Aboriginal Community

Part III: Emerging Applications and New Challenges
Chapter 14: Potential Contributions and Challenges of VGI for Conventional Topographic Base-Mapping Programs
Chapter 15: “We Know Who You Are and We Know Where You Live”: A Research Agenda for Web Demographics
Chapter 16: Volunteered Geographic Information, Actor-Network Theory, and Severe-Storm Reports
Chapter 17: VGI as a Compilation Tool for Navigation Map Databases
Chapter 18: VGI and Public Health: Possibilities and Pitfalls
Chapter 19: VGI in Education: From K-12 to Graduate Studies
Chapter 20: Prospects for VGI Research and the Emerging Fourth Paradigm