Geospatial Information Bottom-Up: A Matter of Trust and Semantics

Geographic Information Science and business are facing a new challenge: understanding and exploiting data and services emerging from online communities. In the emerging technologies of the social web, GI user roles switched from being data consumers to become data producers, the challenge we argue is in making this generated GI usable. As a use case we point to the increasing demands for up-to-date geographic information combined with the high cost of maintenance which present serious challenges to data providers. In this paper we argue that the social web combined with social network science present a unique opportunity to achieve the goal of reducing the cost of maintenance and update of geospatial data and providing a platform for bottom up approaches to GI. We propose to focus on web-based trust as a proxy measure for quality and to study its spatio-temporal dimensions. We also point to work on combining folksonomies with ontologies, allowing for alternative models of metadata and semantics as components of our proposed vision.