A Literature Review on Quality Assurance Mechanisms for Volunteered Geographic Information

Nowadays, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) becomes an important source of massive citizen-generated Geographic Information (GI) datasets. VGI not only creates new GI datasets, it enriches the existing authoritative datasets as well. Furthermore, in some contexts where authoritative datasets is not available, VGI may be the only source of GI. Although, VGI possess numerous advantages, it unfortunately faces several challenges. One of the clear challenges that face VGI is the quality. VGI quality is inherently heterogeneous and VGI lacks quality assurance. Due to its different nature, VGI does not comply with standard quality assurance procedures that are applied to spatial data. Thus, assuring VGI quality becomes increasingly important. Various previously proposed studies are concerned with VGI quality assurance. This paper conducts a literature review on previously proposed VGI quality assurance mechanisms. The paper discusses each mechanism and its limitations. A comparison between all proposed mechanisms is conducted as well.