Addressing VGI Case Study

Article under Review for the International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, Special Issue GSDI-11, submitted
2009-03-01
Addressing vagueness in Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) A case study

Bertrand De Longueville European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Environment & Sustainability Ispra, Italy Email: bertrand.de-longueville@jrc.it Nicole Ostlnder European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Environment & Sustainability Ispra, Italy Email: nicole.ostlaender@jrc.it Carina Keskitalo Department of Social and Economic Geography Ume University, Sweden Email: Carina.Keskitalo@geography.umu.se Abstract The stakeholders that are directly affected by the climate change might become an invaluable source of information if their perceptions are shared with the general public and the scientific community. Such Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) about environmental phenomena have however a certain degree of vagueness, as they describe only a spatiotemporal and thematic snapshot of the entire phenomenon. To reconcile vagueness of stakeholders perception of environmental phenomenon with the crisp objects vision of current VGI, we propose a hybrid strategy, combining an Open Gazetteer approach, and the concept of Degree of Truth. On this basis, we describe eVGI, an innovative web application based on a service-oriented architecture. We implemented eVGI as a prototype, addressing a real-world case study implying stakeholders from forestry, fishing and reindeer husbandry sectors in the Barents region. Keywords: VGI, vagueness, climate change, stakeholder perceptions, web services
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Article under Review for the International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, Special Issue GSDI-11, submitted 2009-03-01
1. INTRODUCTION The environmental changes that are referred to using the term climate change are expected to affect our environment exceedingly. How these changes might look like and which will be the resulting impacts on our society are questions that are continuously addressed in todays research. Recently published and widely discussed were e.g. the results of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (Stern, 2007) and the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) (Anisimov et al., 2007) available from IPCC (2007). Particularly the latter points out that, in order to increase our understanding of climate change and the resulting impacts, stakeholder perceptions and local knowledge are an invaluable source of information, if shared with the general public and the scientific community. With the recent developments in Web technology, which are often summarized as Web 2.0, the possibilities to share information obtained an entirely new quality: being mere information users in the past, a growing number of internet users now voluntarily share their knowledge and experience with other internet users. They create what is called user-generated content (Craglia et al., 2008). One of the most popular products of such an activity is Wikipedia, the free multilingual online encyclopaedia. If, however, user-generated information is not only factual but bears a distinct spatiotemporal component, one speaks about Volunteered Geographic Information, VGI for short (cf. Goodchild, 2007). When we are dealing with climate change, VGI has a great potential: beyond being mere observers of environmental changes, stakeholders can link these changes to the impacts that they experience. Goodchild (2007) goes as far as comparing stakeholders (or in fact, all citizens) to a new type of sensor network where each citizen is a sensor that is [...] equipped with some working subset of the five senses and with the intelligence to compile and interpret what they sense, and each free to rove the surface of the planet. Particularly if they work in sectors that rely on natural resources, citizens can provide valuable information by applying local and sectoral knowledge (IPCC, 2007; Keskitalo, 2008). The research presented in this paper focuses on a particular type of information: stakeholder perceptions in form of testimonials that describe environmental phenomena in a spatial, temporal and thematic manner and the resulting impacts on their sector and way of life. This research is based on a real-world case study in the Barents region in the European north. It was initiated in the EU-funded 5th framework project BALANCE1 and continued after the project ended in 2006:
BALANCE stands for Global Change Vulnerabilities in the Barents Region: Linking Arctic Natural Resources, Climate Change and Economies. BALANCE was supported by the fifth framework
over the last years, actors from the forestry, fishing and reindeer husbandry sectors in the Barents region have been interviewed concerning their perception of environmental changes linked to climate change, and how these changes impact them according to their experience on the field (Keskitalo, 2008). While many of todays VGI systems describe VGI on man-made objects, such as streets, single houses, cities, etc., systems for capturing VGI on environmental phenomena are sparse (Rinner et al., 2008). In order to support research on climate change through VGI we therefore aim at building such a system that allows capturing stakeholder perceptions for the given case study. Such perceptions have a spatial, a temporal and a thematic component. In this paper we make the first steps towards such a system by analyzing how the stakeholders in the case study describe the geographic location of environmental phenomena and formulate the requirements for capturing such information. Popular VGI systems like OpenStreetMap and WikiMapia inherit the objectoriented vision of geographic information, implying a certain spatial precision. Depending on the type of VGI that is expressed, the spatial precision might indeed be high. For example if the provided information marks an addresses (my house or my favourite coffee bar) or has been created using a GPS device (my street) (Goodchild, 2007). However peoples perceptions of environmental phenomena might not correspond to a known address. Or they might themselves be unsure about the extent of the environmental phenomenon they witnessed, as their perception is recovered from memory, or they perceived only part of the entire phenomenon. In other words, their perceptions might be geographically vague. Thus, when it comes to existing VGI systems there turns out to be a lack of how to express such spatial vagueness, both when the information is entered by one stakeholder, and when it is browsed and displayed by others. Motivated by the above, we formulate the following research question to be addressed in this paper: How can stakeholders perception of environmental phenomena be integrated with the current vision of VGI? In order to address this issue we suggest a hybrid strategy by combining an open gazetteer approach (Jones et al., 2008), and the concept of degree of truth (Fisher, 2000). The open gazetteer approach permits users to locate events using their own words and reference system. The concept of degree of truth includes elements of the fuzzy sets theory in the web based VGI system to reflect uncertainty of a given localization. As a proof-of concept we design a web based system that can capture, store and portray this volunteered and vague geographic information, to effectively capture stakeholder testimonials on climate change. The web based
programme of the European Commission, within the Programme on Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development [EVK2-2002-00169].
system will be applied for an ongoing study of forestry, reindeer husbandry and tourism in selected locations in northern Sweden. The remainder of paper is structured as follows: In section 2 we describe the concepts and technologies that underlie our research. We then analyze the stakeholder perceptions collected in a qualitative stakeholder study (section 3) to identify how locations are perceived and described for the given case study. These results are the input to section 4, where we describe the concept and prototypic implementation of a VGI system for environmental information (eVGI) for the given case study. This is followed by conclusion and future work items in section 5. 2. PREVIOUS WORK In this section we describe previous work in the field of VGI initiatives and related systems. We focus on of the aspect of vagueness of geographic information and how to capture it, and on the use of gazetteers. 2.1 Volunteered Geographic Information The World Wide Web recently experienced a major shift in terms of technology and user paradigms. Technologies like web services at the server side (Cerami, 2002), and AJAX at the client side (Sayar et al., 2006) enhanced interoperability of components and modularity of the platform, making any piece of information ubiquitous. At the same time, user-generated content gained a critical mass, so that by now the content of blogs, wikis, and social networks is seen as the wisdom of the crowds (O'Reilly, 2005). This new version of the Web, characterized by user-generated contents, modularity and social networking, is often referred to as Web 2.0. According to Goodchild (2007), the term Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is used to designate any user-generated content that has a relation to the surface of the earth. Popular examples are GPS tracks of cars and points of interest such as look-outs, restaurants, coffee bars, etc. There are various VGI applications that allow users to upload and browse information in various media (text, pictures, videos, documents, etc.). The information is linked through a spatial reference to a location on a map. In the following sections we describe some prominent initiatives and their online applications for uploading and browsing VGI. OpenStreetMap2 is one of the most famous VGI initiatives. The OpenStreetMap product is a free, editable and general-purpose street map. It is created by
2
http://www.openstreetmap.org/
collaborative methods, where users can upload new streets through GPS tracks or modify existing information (e.g. for the purpose of quality enhancement). This VGI initiative aims to extend the geographic coverage of the OpenStreetMap product to the whole world. At time of writing, it contained more than 22 millions of kilometres of roads, covering 114 countries on the 5 continents (OpenStreetMap, 2009). The WikiMapia initiative3 was inspired by the success of the online multilingual encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. However, other than Wikipedia, WikiMapia focuses on providing information strictly related to a particular geographic location (i.e. about towns, cities, lakes, regions, etc.). It offers a map interface to browse the content. Users can create bounding boxes, or more detailed polygons inside a bounding box. They can insert in addition a title, a short description, and a link to a Wikipedia page that gives more information about the described item. Users can also specify which language they used. Google Maps, the geographic interface to the Google search engine, allows users to create VGI in the form of all-purpose personal maps4. Such maps (called My Map) are collections of points, lines or polygons that are associated with media items (e.g. text, html documents, photos, videos). The contents of such maps can be searched by other users that selected the option search usercreated contents. These examples illustrate how VGI can concern vast amounts of data, and find applications in various domains. In addition, VGI becomes always more ubiquitous, with, the possibility to geotag blog posts5 , or to generate geotagged messages and photos or videos directly from GPS-enabled smart phone. 2.2 Vagueness in geographic information A concept is known as vague if at least one of its characteristics does not obey to Boolean logic. The sorties paradox provides a concrete illustration of vagueness (Fisher, 2000). If we try to answer to the question: How many grains of sand do we need to have a heap of sand? we wont obviously be able to provide a clear numeric answer. In logical terms, we cannot set a border value N, where If the number of grains is > N then this.IsHeap is True else, this.IsHeap is False. Similarly, we cannot set a clear fixed N, the number of (kilo)meters between the point A and the point B where If distance between A and B < N then A is close to B, else A is far to B. It would have no sense if a single meter drastically changes the spatial relation between A and B.
3 4
http://wikimapia.org/ http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68480 5 http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2008/12/new-feature-geotagging.html
Geographic information offers numerous examples of vagueness: What are the boundaries of downtown Santa Barbara? (Montello et al., 2003) How to delineate regions like Midlands or Rocky Mountains? (Arampatzis et al., 2006) What is the extent of a given meteorological phenomenon (e.g. a rainstorm)? Where is the border between the rural area and the urban area in a region? What portion of a river is polluted by a given pollution source? (Dilo et al., 2007) In all those cases, concrete concepts would be very difficult to delineate with precision on a map. The type of VGI we are interested in are perceptions rather than measurements. VGI participants are not digital probes that are sending precise numeric values through a network of sensors. They are human beings interacting with a computer (or any type of mobile electronic device) to share their perceptions (Goodchild, 2007). This is an important feature to take in account, because VGI participants perceptions about geography are vague by their own nature. Fishers (2000) works on perception-based geography led this author to the following conclusions: [VGI participants] live in a world steeped in vagueness where they function effectively, and they think about geography and space as vague concepts. [] Vagueness is a necessary part of the human experience of geography. [Therefore,] it is essential that geographical databases should use the same vagueness in user interaction. 2.3 Modelling vagueness using degrees of truth Geographic Information Systems are traditionally based on a crisp object model that does not fit with vagueness modelling (Burrough, 1992)(Cross & Firat, 2000). This object model provides the ability to encapsulate any real-life geographical object as a unit of spatial and alpha-numerical (attribute) information along with methods that specify meaningful operations on those objects. The information that characterizes an object is not vague: the spatial component is a precise point, path or polygon, and attributes have a precise value (text, number or date in most cases). As an alternative to the object model, the raster data model is useful to describe continuous spatial variables. According to this model, numerical values are assigned to each pixel of a raster dataset, which are portrayed using colour scales (Bastin et al., 1999). VGI systems are usually based on the crisp object model to encode, store and portray data. The concept of degree of truth is useful to reconcile object model with vagueness. Underlying this concept, the multi-valued logic aims to replace a Boolean vision of objects characteristics. In other terms, we can express with the degree of truth that an object tends to have a given characteristic to some extent (expressed in a continuous scale form 0 to 1) instead of being forced to say that this object has (1, true) this characteristic or not (0, false). Applied to the sorties
paradox, we can say that A is close to B has a higher degree of truth when the distance between A and B is 10 kilometres than when it is 1000 kilometres (Fisher, 2000). This concept is often used by spatial analysis techniques: a raster data set shows the spatial distribution of the values of the degree of truth of a given parameter (Dilo et al., 2007). Two techniques for modelling vagueness while using an object data model can be derived from the concepts described in this section: objects with specific attributes that express degrees of membership to model vagueness about their spatial and non-spatial characteristics can be captured and stored in such systems; raster layers can be used to portray information with vague geographic boundaries. 2.4 Gazetteers, geographical names and natural language Gazetteers are directories of place names matched with geographic coordinates (ISO, 2003). A web service that is built on top of such a directory and integrated into a web application allows users to query a place by typing its name, and automatically zoom to the corresponding location (OGC, 2006). In other words, users can use the knowledge inside the gazetteer to translate their verbal knowledge (i.e. place names) in geographical information (i.e. locations displayed on a map). Prominent examples of online gazetteers are the open source Geonames6, the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names7 and the GEOnet Names8 Server created and maintained by the U.S. National GeospatialIntelligence Agency. Gazetteers are usually built on top of administrative data sets provided by public mapping agencies. However in real-world applications, vernacular names which do not correspond to those official place names are often used to name places (Wang, 2000). There is thus a need to enrich gazetteers with vernacular names to ensure that users can use their natural language to find or describe geographical locations. Several authors contributed to develop this concept, such as Jones et al. (2008), Goldberg (2007) and Goodchild & Hill (2006), but a generic term to designate this particular case of gazetteers is still missing. In this article, we will use the term open gazetteer to designate the concept of gazetteer enriched with vernacular place names. Recent research proposed interesting strategies to obtain geographic reference for vernacular names that are often used to describe regions with vague limits.
6 7
http://www.geonames.org http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/ 8 http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html
Arampatzis et al. (2006), and then Jones et al. (2008), harvested information from the World Wide Web to find correspondence between vernacular names and official place names. On the basis of information retrieved through the Google search engine, Jones et al. (2008) established relations between the Midlands (vernacular region name), and cities and towns (official place names) that were cited on web pages as part of this region. They could then give an approximate extent to Midlands and include it in their gazetteer. This approach, however, can be expected to be less efficient if applied to place names that are used only by a particular community, as it could be expected in the use case presented in this article (see Section 3). 3. ANALYSIS OF STAKEHOLDER PERCEPTIONS As we described in the introduction, the concepts for capturing perceptions and the resulting vague geographic information is based on a real world case study. This case study was carried out by the Department of Social and Economic Geography, Ume University. The study addresses sector-specific vulnerability to climate change. The case study area is located in the European north, where climate change is expected to be particularly pronounced (cf. Anisimov et al. 2007). In this section 3 we will briefly describe the case study, its results and how its results were analyzed in relation to vagueness in geographic information. We start of in section 3.1 with an overview over the case study area and the sectors addressed. This is followed in section 3.2 by a concise overview over the method that was used to collect stakeholder perceptions. We put a particular emphasis on the geographic location. In section 3.3 we describe how the stakeholder perceptions were analyzed and which conclusions were drawn from it. 3.1 Case study area and sectors under consideration This study focuses on multiple use of forest lands in Gllivare municipality, situated in far northern Sweden. The area includes forestry, substantial environmental protection, tourism with a focus on winter tourism, and reindeer husbandry. Reindeer husbandry is in general practiced on the same area as forestry, where forest owners ranging from industry to private small-holder forest owners hold an ownership right while reindeer husbandry holds a user right. Double land use systems thus operate in the same areas. In general in Sweden, the numbers of stakeholders in these sectors vary considerably in the reindeer husbandry area, comprising some 40% of Sweden, there exist some 2500 persons active in reindeer husbandry to some 40,000 private forest owners, with corresponding differences in importance for the GNP. In addition, environmental protection plays a large role in many inland and mountain-close municipalities, such as Gllivare, and is often seen as subtracting valuable land
from forestry. This means that the interaction between forestry, reindeer husbandry, winter tourism and environmental protection are crucial for land use pressure, which is increased by the effects of climate change. Northern Sweden also has a well developed road network, which means that there exists a fragmentation in terms of available land. Development and production or conservation pressures in the sectors are thus creating a situation that can be expected to be further impacted by climate change. Climate change can here be expected to impact the balance between sectors and strongly affect actors such as reindeer husbandry that both requires large land areas and is highly vulnerable to fluctuations across the freeze-thaw threshold (0C). Climate change could also be beneficial to some larger actors, such as forestry, due to increased forest growth, but impact e.g. local harvesting and transport conditions. 3.2 Collecting stakeholder perceptions The volunteered geographic information has been retrieved from semi-structured interviews, approximately 1-1,5 hours long, undertaken during autumn 2008. In these interviews, the interviewees were asked to describe their land use, how this would be affected by specific projected climate change impacts (such as warmer winters with more thawing events) and also to indicate important areas for land use during different seasons on a map of the municipality. This means that the data comprises both map-based volunteered information about important areas, and oral descriptions of the areas and land use. Often during interviews, interview persons also mention specific events (such as problems in moving reindeer through certain areas in relation to specific geographic information, for instance a location or a river). Interview persons also describe differences in land use over time, for instance, the different requirements they have during different seasons (e.g., migration routes or grazing land of different types). The interviews were recorded and transcribed in full, which means that they were written out word-byword in transcripts that are then possible to analyse for, for instance, geographical and seasonal use data. Interview selection was based on existing companies and administration in the sectors in the region, and constitutes a full selection of actors within the sectors and selection parameters. These encompassed forestry and forest administration (main land owners Sveaskog as well as separately their Model Forest representative, SCA, the Common Property Board, the two Common Forests as well as the Swedish Forest Agency administration, the private forest owners interest group Norra Skogsgarna, and forest coordinator at the municipality), chairs of the five main reindeer husbandry units having reindeer grazing in the area, the twelve existing winter tourismfocused companies, and the one existing environmental protection organization as well as administration of environmental protection at the county administrative board. In total were interviews made with 28 persons.
3.3 Interpretation of results In order to understand how people in the case study perceive and describe environmental phenomena, we analysed the interviews undertaken in the case study area: From the transcribed interviews we extracted those expressions which the interviewees use that are related to location, hence called geo-quotes. To address the vagueness of environmental phenomena related to climate change, we further narrowed down our search to those geo-quotes that describe environmental phenomena they observed and the resulting impact on the interviewees. From the maps that were used during the interviews, we extracted the way how stakeholders mark and delineate the geographic information that supported their geo-quotes. The following paragraphs briefly summaries the findings that arose from the first round of qualitative data analysis and interpretation. Geo-quotes are located using reference points that are of importance for the particular sector. Looking at the quotes we can distinguish those reference points that describe elements which are artificial (e.g. man-made or conceptual) and those reference points that describe the interviewees natural environment. Examples for such artificial reference points are: administrative units such as municipalities and settlements, the transport network including major roads and railway lines, power lines, and power plants. Natural reference points are e.g. particular vegetation-types, locations with vegetation that has certain qualities (e.g. the presence of tree lichen in forests) and topographic elements like mountains, rivers and lakes. Reference points might differ, depending on the sector they are used for. For example, reindeer herders repeatedly used their pastures as reference points. The reference points are given in the language of the interviewee (e.g. Swedish or Smi). The reference points do not necessarily mark the location itself where a perception was made, but they mark the point which is closest to their observation (e.g. east of ..., west of ). The stakeholders use further expressions that mark a certain vagueness of their perceptions or their memory of its exact location. Examples are up here, this mountain country here, or here and there. The interviewees marked locations of their perceptions on topographic maps. First screenings of the material reveal that they use points, lines and polygons, as well as existing map features such as lakes and rivers to mark the location of perceptions. The line features mainly delineated subsets of existing artificial reference points such as roads and power lines, in which cases they were as precise as the map. Points and polygons on the other hand were used to delineate elements in the natural environment. Particularly the polygons can best
be described as sketches: they do not mark a precisely delineated geometric object, but a rather a rough estimation of the location. 4. VGI FOR ENVIRONOMENTAL DATA (EVGI) PROTOTYPE
The requirement of coupling web-based visualisation with functionality to add geolocated user-generated contents is already addressed by numerous VGI clients. However, as Rinner et al., 2008 emphasised, the serious applications of VGI are sparse. In addition, we did not find any that was addressing the vagueness that characterize the users perception of environmental phenomena. This is one of the main characteristics of the eVGI prototype we describe in detail in this section. The eVGI prototype uses the concept Degrees of Truth described in Section 2 to encode, store and portray vague Volunteered Geographical Information. In the following section we briefly describe the system vision and related use cases (section 4.1), followed by a description of the architecture (4.2) and the main system components (4.3 4.6). 4.1 System vision and use cases Based on the results of the previous section, we develop a prototype for VGI for environmental data (eVGI). The system vision can be summarized as follows: The eVGI prototype shall be a web application. This application shall allow users to encode and to visualise perceptions of environmental phenomena in form of geocoded testimonials. The focus lies on supporting the use of vernacular names both for browsing and creating testimonials, and to capture how vague the users knowledge is concerning the exact location of the perception that underlies the testimonial. The prototype is a proof of concept for the use of the following approaches: open gazetteer: In order to allow users to describe locations using their own words, the eVGI shall offer an open gazetteer that can be enriched with vernacular place names. As the given user community is rather small, we propose that users actively create new entries, rather than an automatic harvesting mechanism (cf. section 2.4). degree of truth: Assuming that the testimonials contain a certain degree of vagueness, the eVGI shall offer a mechanism to capture (testimonial creation) and to represent (testimonial visualisation) information on the degree of truth concerning the location that a testimonial describes. Based on the system vision and the suggested approaches, we identify three use cases when interacting with the system: (1) creating a new testimonial and (2) extending the open gazetteer with new vernacular place names:
1. Create new testimonial: The user navigates to a point of reference in a map, supported by the open gazetteer, if necessary. He marks the location of his perception by drawing a point, line or polygon on the map. He evaluates for the given location the degree of vagueness. He adds his testimonial, i.e. a title and a body text that describes his perception at a given place. The system visualises the testimonial, reflecting the locations degree of truth. 2. Extend open gazetteer: In order to extend the gazetteer with a new entry the user navigates to the place he wants to describe. He either draws a point, a line or a polygon, or he uses the current bounding box to describe the extent of the place he wants to add to the open gazetteer. He then adds a name to the place. In case that the open gazetteer already includes the location, the user can extent the open gazetteer entry by adding a new vernacular name to an existing place. 4.2 Architectural overview The eVGI prototype is based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to ensure interoperability of the services, reusability of components, and extensibility of the system (Yang et al., 2007). The eVGI prototype implements OGC-compliant web services (OGC, 2008), namely: OGC Transactional Web Feature Services (WFST) for user-created information encoding and OGC Web Map Services (WMS) for map rendering. The choice of OGC-compliant components has been motivated by the fact that OGC standards are widely accepted in the Geographic Information community. In addition, reliable Open Source OGC-compliant software products are available and can be easily integrated as components into our system. The figure 1 provides an overview of the eVGI architecture. The eVGI prototype is based on a 3-tier architecture, where: the presentation tier include the eVGI smart client (for encoding information) or any other OGC-compliant web map client (for visualisation); the logic tier is made of an OGC-compliant web server that allows us to deploy our eVGI web services; the data tier is made of a GIS database (i.e. a database specifically designed to store geographic objects and their attributes). On the architectural point of view, eVGI prototype is quite classical. Its originality resides in the way each component has been implemented. Each component is described with more detail in the next sections.
Figure 1: The architecture of the eVGI prototype.
4.3 Component #1: VGI data encoding (eVGI smart client) The eVGI smart client offers user-friendly functionalities to encode environmental VGI, taking in account its inherent vagueness. It is based on two JavaScript libraries: Openlayers9 (for mapping features) and ExtJS10 (for GUI layout and AJAX behaviours). It uses a Transactional Web Features Service (WFS-T) to store Volunteered Geographic Information in the eVGI database. Using the eVGI smart client, stakeholders can draw vector features (points, lines or polygons) and encode attributes as non-geographic information associated with each feature. It contains the testimonial itself, i.e. the perceptions they had on the field of environmental phenomenon they think to be related to climate change. Those attributes will also include important metadata about the geographic vagueness
9
10
http://www.openlayers.org/ http://extjs.com/products/extjs/
that characterise a given testimonial. We included two types of vagueness metadata. The first type is user-encoded vagueness metadata. This qualitative metadata provides a self-assessment of VGI. When filling the attribute form, the user chooses in a dropdown list which level of geographic precision he considers his testimonial has. We propose the following list of values: 5 = its exactly there; 4 = its there; 3 = its more or less there; 2 = it must be somewhere around there; 1 = I m not sure if it is somewhere around there; 0 = I dont know where it is. This approach has to be tested, in order to establish, in collaboration with the stakeholders, a list of values that contains both an appropriate number of values and an appropriate text associated with each of them. The second type is system-created vagueness metadata. This qualitative metadata provides us a more objective measurement of VGI vagueness. In addition to this self-evaluation of vagueness, the eVGI smart client automatically stores the scale at which the feature as been drawn. Indeed, it has been proved that encoding scale is a good indicator of geographic precision (Zhang & Goodchild, 2000). For example, we expect that, if the user has a good idea the location of the place he refers to, he will zoom to a level of detail where he can see lakes, rivers, land use and other topographic and artificial reference points that will help him to locate the perception on the map. Oppositely, if the user has only a vague idea of the location, he most likely will not bother to zoom too precisely. User-encoded and system-created metadata are very complementary and will provide a good estimate of the vagueness that characterise every piece of VGI encoded trough the eVGI smart client. 4.4 Component #2: VGI data storage (eVGI Database) The Figure 2 below shows the most important elements of the eVGI database structure: the Users table and the Testimonial table. The Users table stores the information required for user identification, such as unique identifier, nickname, and contact details. It furthermore stores system-specific user data, like its role in the management of the eVGI system, his favourite language for the interface or the field he is working in.
The Testimonials table is the main table of the eVGI database: it stores the Volunteered Geographic Information itself. As in any classical GIS database, each record in this table contains a geographic feature (point, line or polygon, store in the Geometry field) together with alphanumeric fields called attributes. Among those attributes are the title and body text of the testimonial, as well as the period of time it is referring to. The Testimonials table contains as well several attributes that we can call Metadata about testimonials, as they are not part of the testimonial, but they are telling us more about it. Three fields among those Metadata store the information about geographic vagueness of the testimonials: scalecreated stores the map scale at which the user had zoomed when he encoded the geographic component of his testimonial; similarly, scalemodified stores the map scale at which the user had zoomed when he modified the last time the geographic component of his testimonial, if applicable; authorVaguenessAssesmt stores the value the user encoded to assess the precision he encoded, on a scale from 5 to 0. These Metadata about geographic vagueness of the testimonials will be used when analysing the data, and to portray them, as described in section 4.6.
Figure 2: The eVGI database structure.
4.5 Component #3: VGI data portrayal (eVGI web services) The portrayal of eVGI web services is based on the egg-yolk representation model (Cohn & Gotts, 1996). According to this model, each vague geospatial object is represented by two elements: the yolk is a crisp geographic object representing the most certain part of the vague object, while the white is the broad boundary that delineates limits on the range of vagueness. The degree of truth decreases from 1 at the boundary between the yolk and the white to 0
outside the white boundaries (Dilo et al., 2007). An example of such representation is provided in Figure 3.
Figure 3: The egg-yolk representation of vague point, line and polygon
As suggested by Bastin et al. (1999), we use a raster dataset to represent spatial uncertainty. We have thus to process our raw data (i.e. vector features with Metadata about spatial vagueness) in order to calculate all pixel values of such raster data set. This pixel value will express a degree of truth for each vector feature, i.e. it will state how much likely a user-encoded object can be extrapolated to this pixel. A mathematical function describing spatial distribution of vagueness still has to be formalised. We see three main parameters for this function. The first parameter is the distance to the encoded vector feature (D). It is inversely proportional to the degree of truth as it decreases with distance, i.e. the further we are from a vector feature, the less likely it can be extrapolated to our position. The second parameter is the scale at which the vector feature has been encoded (S, the scale denominator). It is proportional to the degree of truth if we assume that, the bigger is the scale denominator, the smaller is precision of the vector feature and then the higher is the degree of trust. The third element is the userencoded vagueness assessment (A, higher value mean means higher precision). It is inversely proportional to the degree of truth, as more precise information will have a smaller degree of truth outside the vector feature. How these elements should be combined into a function to determine the visualization still has to be established and verified in further research. The portrayal of information contained in the eVGI is based on an OGC Web Map Service (WMS). The legend is specifically designed to express the degree of truth that can be associated to the portrayed features. In the same time, the service supports GetFeatureInfo request, which means that any OGC compliant client
can show to the user the contents of the testimonial associated with those features. 4.6 Component #4: Open Gazetteer for eVGI (eVGI open gazetteer) The eVGI open gazetteer is based on a Web Feature Service, as recommended by OGC (2006) best practices. Users can add entries to this gazetteer through a Transactional Web Feature Service (WFS-T). Following the open gazetteer principle described in section 2.4, users can query and enrich the eVGI open gazetteer using the eVGI smart client. It offers a search place functionality with an interface made of simple text field for encoding the name of the searched place, and a button to trigger the query. Depending on the results, several cases can occur: there is only one, not ambiguous result: the maps zooms automatically to the corresponding location, and a message telling that the query was successful is returned to the user; there are several results: the list of results is displayed together with additional information about (e.g. administrative subdivisions in which the places are situated) and the user is invited to select the one that fits to his needs (or to tell that none fits, see case #3); there are no results, or the results returned dont correspond to the users expectations: in this case, the user is invited to enrich the gazetteer by drawing the places bounding box and providing additional info (only the place name is essential). In consequence, the system will include vernacular names thanks to information provided by the users. They will be stored as new entries in a Gazetteer that initially will contain only official place names and those names will be added in the gazetteer for further use. The eVGI Open Gazetteer will thus offer increasing possibilities for the users to use their natural language to describe located events. The user will be able to visualise existing entries of the Gazetteer and to add a new place name to an existing feature if required. 5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK In this paper, we presented the eVGI prototype, an innovative Volunteered Geographic Information system. It was developed to address a real-world case study implying stakeholders from forestry, fishing and reindeer husbandry sectors in the Barents region. We described the use cases, design, architecture and components of the eVGI systems, with a particular focus on functionalities that address our research question: how can stakeholders the vague geographic component of perception of environmental phenomena be integrated with the
current vision of VGI? The eVGI prototype is a web-based system for encoding, storing and portray vague environmental information that can be hopefully adapted to other projects involving environmental VGI. The eVGI client we developed is graphical user interface (GUI) that allows creating VGI together with Metadata about its geographical Vagueness. Starting from the observation on how stakeholders sketched paper maps, we made design assumptions to offer them similar functionality in digital form. Future work should assess the functional quality of eVGI, by observing how stakeholders use it. We justified the choice of the egg-yolk model (Cohn & Gotts, 1996), as it allows to represent the user-encoded crisp object together with a spatial representation of its Metadata about vagueness. Portrayal of the vagueness information we captured should be improved by adaption a formal and well documented mathematical formalism in this purpose. Compared to information harvested on the World Wide Web (cfr. Jones et al., 2008)), the information encoded only by the users of the system is expected considerably less vast, due to the limited amount of users. However, this form of Open Gazetteer is expected to be more adapted to sector-specific users that use their own address space. We collected two types of VGI: gazetteer entries and testimonials. While for the testimonials we captured vagueness of geographic information, this has not been addressed for the gazetteer entries. However, as Arampatzis et al. (2006) demonstrated, vernacular place names have also vague spatial extent. Thus, future versions of our prototype should take this fact in account. Another important research field for future works is the definition of ontology for open gazetteers. The implementation of adequate ontology would make possible the addition of a hierarchy between place names (e.g. if a place is a part of a wider place), the possibility to support multilingual entries, and the possibility to define the thematic scope of entries (i.e. define to which sector of activity it belongs). The eVGI is designed to collect perceptions from users of environmental phenomena, taking in account potential vagueness of the geographic component of such perceptions. Main current VGI systems, such as WikiMapia or OpenStreetMap, simply ignore this vagueness. Taking it in account is a step towards quality assessment, and therefore towards credibility of VGI. Credibility of VGI is an important field for future works. We should, for example, improve the quality control by implementing a peer-to-peer credibility assessment ( Flanagin & Metzger, 2008). This could be based on rating and commenting functionalities offered to stakeholders.
Finally, it is important to notice that this paper focused on the geographical component of the stakeholders perceptions. Future works should address the temporal and thematic components as well.
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Article under Review for the International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, Special Issue GSDI-11, submitted

Addressing vagueness in Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) A case study

http://wikimapia.org/ http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68480 5 http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2008/12/new-feature-geotagging.html

http://www.geonames.org http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/ 8 http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html

Figure 1: The architecture of the eVGI prototype.

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