Salk, Carl and See, Linda and Sturn, Tobias and Fritz, Steffen and Perger, Christoph
(2016).
Assessing quality of volunteer crowdsourcing contributions: lessons from the Cropland Capture game.
International Journal Of Digital Earth. 9
:4
, 410-426
[Research article]
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- Accepted Version
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2015.1039609
Abstract
Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is the assembly of spatial information based on public input. While VGI has proliferated in recent years, assessing the quality of volunteer-contributed data has proven challenging, leading some to question the efficiency of such programs. In this paper, we compare several quality metrics for individual volunteers' contributions. The data were the product of the Cropland Capture' game, in which several thousand volunteers assessed 165,000 images for the presence of cropland over the course of 6 months. We compared agreement between volunteer ratings and an image's majority classification with volunteer self-agreement on repeated images and expert evaluations. We also examined the impact of experience and learning on performance. Volunteer self-agreement was nearly always higher than agreement with majority classifications, and much greater than agreement with expert validations although these metrics were all positively correlated. Volunteer quality showed a broad trend toward improvement with experience, but the highest accuracies were achieved by a handful of moderately active contributors, not the most active volunteers. Our results emphasize the importance of a universal set of expert-validated tasks as a gold standard for evaluating VGI quality.
Authors/Creators: | Salk, Carl and See, Linda and Sturn, Tobias and Fritz, Steffen and Perger, Christoph | ||||
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Title: | Assessing quality of volunteer crowdsourcing contributions: lessons from the Cropland Capture game | ||||
Series Name/Journal: | International Journal Of Digital Earth | ||||
Year of publishing : | 2016 | ||||
Volume: | 9 | ||||
Number: | 4 | ||||
Page range: | 410-426 | ||||
Number of Pages: | 17 | ||||
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis | ||||
ISSN: | 1753-8955 | ||||
Language: | English | ||||
Publication Type: | Research article | ||||
Refereed: | Yes | ||||
Article category: | Scientific peer reviewed | ||||
Version: | Accepted version | ||||
Full Text Status: | Public | ||||
Agris subject categories.: | U Auxiliary disciplines > U30 Research methods | ||||
Subjects: | (A) Swedish standard research categories 2011 > 1 Natural sciences > 105 Earth and Related Environmental Sciences > Environmental Sciences (social aspects to be 507) (A) Swedish standard research categories 2011 > 1 Natural sciences > 105 Earth and Related Environmental Sciences > Geosciences, Multidisciplinary | ||||
Keywords: | crowdsourcing, volunteered geographic information, cropland, data quality, image classification, Geo-Wiki | ||||
URN:NBN: | urn:nbn:se:slu:epsilon-e-4139 | ||||
Permanent URL: | http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:slu:epsilon-e-4139 | ||||
Additional ID: |
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ID Code: | 14273 | ||||
Faculty: | S - Faculty of Forest Sciences | ||||
Department: | (S) > Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre | ||||
Deposited By: | SLUpub Connector | ||||
Deposited On: | 28 Apr 2017 07:50 | ||||
Metadata Last Modified: | 09 Sep 2020 14:17 |
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