Quality Assessment of Volunteered Geographic Information: An Investigation into the Ottawa-Gatineau OpenStreetMap Database

Within the realm of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), reliability and quality of the geographic information continues to be a pressing concern. Many VGI projects do not have standard geospatial data quality assurance procedures and the reliability of such contributors remains in question. This study investigates the quality of VGI by analysing OpenStreetMap (OSM) data in Ottawa-Gatineau. First, a review of past publications into quality assessment of OSM data is examined. Next, a comparative analysis of OSM data is conducted relative to an authoritative dataset. The OSM historical information of map features and contributors is inspected to gain an understanding of how users are contributing to the database and their ability to do so accurately. Overall, OSM data in the context of Ottawa-Gatineau is comparable to or surpasses authoritative dataset quality and clustering contributors based on historical information can help identify tendencies within a contributor base.