The credibility of volunteered geographic information, By Andrew J. Flanagin and Miriam J. Metzger, in GeoJournal (2008) 72:137–148
The study of Flanagin and Metzger (2008) was to exam the issues of information and source credibility in the context of volunteered geographic environment (VGI).
VGI with its similar concepts such as GIS/2, neogeography, or ‘‘geography without geographers’’ has been regarded as an extension of public participation geographic information sys
tems (PPGIS); collaborative GIS; participatory GIS; Community Integrated GIS (CIGIS) to the general public. While the advance of social computing has parallel effects on the production and availability of user-generated geo data, the need to re-conceptualize the traditional definitions of information and source credibility has been proposed here. The credibility of VGI is strongly suggestive based on two concepts from Goodchild(2007)'s "humans as sensors" as well as the perspective of social science which the credibility is "a subjective perception on the part of the information receiver". In contrast, the credibility of VGI taken from the notion of "credibility-as-perception" is functioned as the relatively objective properties of information, rather than "a subjective perception" while compared with the traditional geo information formed by a few individual authority perceptions.
The overall recommendations for the credibility judgments of VGI are listed eight points in the figure below. Research directions such as: on the user motivations; "credibility transfer" phenomena (geo data has been perceived more objective than other forms of user-generated data); market implications; measurement issues (e.g. the provenance of VGI); or the effects of VGI on the social, educational, and political contexts are suggested.