Table Of ContentEarth Systems Data and Models
Gloria Bordogna
Paola Carrara Editors
Mobile Information
Systems Leveraging
Volunteered
Geographic Information
for Earth Observation
Earth Systems Data and Models
Volume 4
Series editors
Bernd Blasius, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany
William Lahoz, NILU—Norwegian Institute for Air Research, Kjeller, Norway
Dimitri P. Solomatine, UNESCO—IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft,
The Netherlands
Aims and Scope
ThebookseriesEarthSystemsDataandModelspublishesstate-of-the-artresearch
and technologies aimed at understanding processes and interactions in the earth
system. A special emphasis is given to theory, methods, and tools used in earth,
planetaryandenvironmentalsciencesfor:modeling,observationandanalysis;data
generation, assimilation and visualization; forecasting and simulation; and opti-
mization. Topics in the series include but are not limited to: numerical, datadriven
and agent-based modeling of the earth system; uncertainty analysis of models;
geodynamic simulations, climate change, weather forecasting, hydroinformatics,
and complex ecological models; model evaluation for decision-making processes
and other earth science applications; and remotesensingand GIS technology.
The series publishes monographs, edited volumes and selected conference
proceedings addressing an interdisciplinary audience, which not only includes
geologists,hydrologists,meteorologists,chemists,biologistsandecologistsbutalso
physicists,engineersandappliedmathematicians,aswellaspolicymakerswhouse
model outputs as the basis of decision-making processes.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10525
Gloria Bordogna Paola Carrara
(cid:129)
Editors
Mobile Information Systems
Leveraging Volunteered
Geographic Information
for Earth Observation
123
Editors
Gloria Bordogna PaolaCarrara
IREACNR IREACNR
Milano Milano
Italy Italy
ISSN 2364-5830 ISSN 2364-5849 (electronic)
EarthSystems Data andModels
ISBN978-3-319-70877-5 ISBN978-3-319-70878-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70878-2
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2017958846
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Contents
Part I Experiences of VGI Creation & Exploitation for Citizen
Science Projects
Mapping Parties at FOSS4G Europe: Fun, Outcomes and Lessons
Learned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
MariaAntoniaBrovelli,PeterMooney,LudovicoBiagi,MarcoBrambilla,
Irene Celino, Eleonora Ciceri, Nicola Dorigatti, Haosheng Huang,
Marco Minghini and Vijaycharan Venkatachalam
Crowdsourcing to Enhance Insights from Satellite Observations . . . . . . 35
Suvodeep Mazumdar, Stuart N. Wrigley, Fabio Ciravegna,
Camille Pelloquin, Sam Chapman, Laura De Vendictis,
Domenico Grandoni, Michele Ferri and Luca Bolognini
CanVGIandMobileAppsSupportLong-TermEcologicalResearch?
A Test in Remote Areas of the Alps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
LauraCriscuolo,PaolaCarrara, AlessandroOggioni,AlessandraPugnetti
and Massimo Antoninetti
Part II Methods and Techniques for VGI Creation, Management
and Analytics
Toward Citizen-Edited Image-Populated Ontologies for Earth
Observation—A Position Paper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Robert Laurini and Imed Riadh Farah
ANetworkofLow-CostAirQualitySensorsandItsUseforMapping
Urban Air Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Philipp Schneider, Nuria Castell, Franck R. Dauge, Matthias Vogt,
William A. Lahoz and Alena Bartonova
v
vi Contents
The Urban Nexus Project: When Urban Mobility Analysis, VGI and
Data Science Meet Together. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Federica Burini, Daniele E. Ciriello, Alessandra Ghisalberti
and Giuseppe Psaila
Part III VGI Quality and its Management and Assessment
A Chimera of VGI, Citizen Science and Mobile Devices . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Vyron Antoniou
Volunteered Metadata, and Metadata on VGI:
Challenges and Current Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Lucy Bastin, Sven Schade and Peter Mooney
Data Quality Assessment in Volunteered Geographic
Decision Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Guy De Tré, Robin De Mol, Sytze van Heteren, Jan Stafleu,
Vasileios Chademenos, Tine Missiaen, Lars Kint, Nathan Terseleer
and Vera Van Lancker
VGI Imperfection in Citizen Science Projects and Its Representation
and Retrieval Based on Fuzzy Ontologies and Level-Based
Approximate Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Gloria Bordogna, Cristiano Fugazza and Alessandro Oggioni
Introduction
Global Earth observation demands both ubiquitous worldwide interaction and
ground-basedinformation.ThewidespreaddiffusionoftheWebandsmartdevices
allows everybody to access and create georeferenced distributed multimedia
information,termedvolunteeredgeographicinformation(VGI)afterGoodchild[1].
By the simple use of applications (apps) or websites accessing mobile information
systems, everybody can provide updated multimedia content from everywhere.
Smart devices are generally equipped with both low-cost memories and sensors
such as GNSS (global navigation satellite system) receivers using the US global
positioning system (GPS) for location awareness, and cameras and accelerometers
for creating and geotagging pictures and videos, i.e., to associate them with a
geographicfootprintonEarth.Besidesimagesandvideos,VGIoftenincludesfree
text describing observations by the author, categories of classification of the
observedentities,recordingsofsounds,whichproviderichandbothsubjectiveand
objective descriptions of reality.
Volunteeredgeographicinformationisbeinginvestigatedasanovelopportunity
to enrich research projects with widespread ground data that can be exploited in
Earth observation, including monitoring of natural, environmental, human-driven
andsocialchangesandevents.Inthesecontexts,VGIcanbeconsideredarelevant
aspectofcitizenscience(CS),i.e.,sciencemadebycitizens’contributions.Forthis
reason, in the last years an increasing number of academic papers and special
journalissueshavefocusedonthecharacteristicsofVGIwithinCSprojectsandon
evaluations of the potential for VGI to help scientists, policymakers, and business
companies in conceiving and launching new services.
Volunteered geographicinformationabout Earth observation couldbe fruitfully
exploited to increase awareness and knowledge of people located in a territory.
Preparedness and emergency management, tourism, leisure and entertainment rec-
ommendations, social security and many scientific areas, such as climatology,
ecology, biodiversity, agriculture and marine research are only some of the fields
that might benefit from the use of mobile information systems leveraging VGI.
These diverse possible uses of VGI motivate the attention of both business com-
panies and industry, willing to offer low-cost location-based services to their
vii
viii Introduction
customers, and research communities, operational organizations and NGO in need
ofhugeamountsofwidespreadinsitugeoreferenceddatatocarryouttheirstudies,
datathattheycouldhardlyacquireotherwise,especiallyinthecasesoflow-budget
projects.
Though the areas of mobile-based information and VGI are related, until now
therehasnotbeenacomprehensiveanalysisoftheirconnectionsandsynergies.On
theoneside,theresearchliteratureonmobileinformationsystemshasanumberof
dedicated conferences and journals [2–4]. Special journal issues have dealt with
mobileinformationsystemsandcomputingbuthavenotconsideredVGI[5].Only
very recently special issues about the management of crowdsourced geospatial
informationinthecontextofmobileinformationsystemshavebeenpublished,and
there are open calls for papers at the date of writing this book [6–9].
Ontheotherside,inthelastyears,VGIandcrowdsourcedgeo-informationhave
become topics of interest in many journals on geo-information and conferences
relatedtodatabases,geographicinformationsystemsandinformationretrievalsuch
as ACM CIKMs, ACM GIS, AGILE, ACM SIGIR, IEEE/ACM/WIC WI, IAR
TrackofACMSAC.DedicatedworkshopsonseveralaspectsofVGImanagement,
such as the recent AGILE 2017 Workshop on VGI analytics, have been organized
[10].Furthermore,thereareanumberofspecialissuesofjournalswhicharerelated
to several aspects of VGI management and use [12–16], but they do not cover
specificaspectsrelatedtotheacquisitionofVGIbymobileinformationsystemsfor
Earth observation applications.
Withrespecttothepublishedliterature,thecontentsofthepresentvolumestress
thelinkbetweenVGIcreationbysmartdevicesanditsuseinEarthobservation,in
particular within both experimental and basic research perspectives. Specifically,
we want to offer some possible answers to open questions such as:
(cid:129) Can experiences carried out within VGI CS projects (collecting in situ geo-
referenced information for Earth observation) provide useful insights on the
characteristics of volunteers and their influence on created VGI? This is an
important question whose answers can help identify “a priori” criteria for
selecting volunteers depending on the tasks requested within a CS project.
(cid:129) What are the characteristics of user interfaces for VGI creation on smart
devicesthat canhelp engage volunteers tocreatehigh-quality VGI? Analysing
distinct application needs of Earth observations projects (which demand cate-
gorizationofobservationsbasedontheperceivedormeasuredpropertiesofthe
objects/events which are targeted by VGI) may suggest both adequate means
and external knowledge for supporting the creation of high-quality VGI.
(cid:129) FromlessonslearntwithinEarthobservationprojectscanwesuggestdirections
forimprovingVGIreusebymeansofnovelcomponentsand/orwebservicesof
mobileinformationsystems?Thatis,canwesuggestmethodsforenablingVGI
stakeholderstoselectrelevantVGIfortheirspecifictasksandneeds?Thisisan
important issue in the data value chain, since the value of data greatly depends
on the potential of its use and reuse. Providing means to aid stakeholders
Introduction ix
selecting VGI (which was created within other projects) for some specific task
of their interest can optimize the chain from data creation to data (re)use.
(cid:129) Which geo-information algorithms and tools can help VGI management for
Earthobservationwithinamobileinformationsystemcontext?Thatis,howcan
wefruitfullyuseVGIacquiredbysmartdevicestocross-analyseandfuseitwith
multisource information? This is a crucial task in the age of big geo data,
characterizedbyhugevolumes,high velocity andvariety, questionablevalidity
and veracity.More frequently, we will have tocope withredundant co-referent
VGI, created within distinct applications by distinct means (both employing
distinct sensors and software) relative to the observation of the same
events/entitiesoftherealworld.Letusthinkofthemanysmartapplicationsthat
allow volunteers to point out traffic jams. In order to increase VGI quality, one
can exploit the fusion of information from distinct sources by filtering and
weighingthecontributions.Tothisend,newmethodsareneededtoidentifythe
highestqualitysourcesofVGIforagivenpurposeandtoquantifyandcompare
their quality. In this respect, the characteristics of the sources and the VGI
lineage will become essential for the definition of VGI metadata.
Discussionsontheabovequestions,whichbegsomepossibleanswers,solutions
and open issues, are dealt within the chapters; they are organized into three parts,
introducing the reader to three basic aspects involved in VGI creation by mobile
information systems and its use for Earth observation.
Thefirstpartfocusesontheanalysisofvolunteers’engagementinrelationtotheir
expertise, motivation, types the task they are called to perform, means and tools
provided to them for creating VGI. Constant volunteers’ engagement over time is
essentialtothesuccessofanycollaborativeinitiativerelatedtoEarthobservationand
monitoring.Nevertheless,itisoftendifficultattractingvolunteerstocontributewithin
aprojectanditisevenmoredifficulttomaintaintheirconstantengagement.Thethree
chapters in this part describe several experiences of VGI collection within CS ini-
tiativesinrelationtotheanalysisofthevolunteers’characteristicsandoutlineofthe
lessonslearnt.Specifically,thefirstchapterdescribesseveralcollaborativeoutdoor
andindoormappingexperimentsusingeitherVGIcreatedby“traditional”mapping
toolsdevelopedforthepopularOpenStreetMapproject,emotionalandgame-based
mappingmethodsorcrowd-contributedgeographiccontentscreatedimplicitlywithin
Twitter. The second chapter discusses the experience of the Crowd4Sat project,
funded by the European Space Agency, that investigated different facets of how
crowdsourcingandcitizenscienceimpactuponthevalidation,useandenhancement
of products and services exploiting observations from satellites. The third chapter
focuses on an experiment of VGI apps used to collect either biological or abiotic
observations during an excursion following naturalistic trails of the Italian Alps
connectingsitesoftheLongTermEcologicalResearch(LTER)network;itanalyses
theimpactonthepracticesoftheresearchcommunitieswhentheyaccepttouseVGI
createdbymeansofinnovativesmartapps.
The second part of the volume is dedicated to the management of VGI within
information systems for Earth observation, i.e., to introduce methods, techniques
