Human Computation VGI Provenance: Semantic Web-Based Representation and Publishing

The collection of volunteered geographic information (VGI) is a user-generated content practice to engage a large number of citizens to collectively create geospatial data. Based on the advent of Web 2.0 and the recent increasing popularity of crowdsourcing approaches, VGI has gained the interest of the geoscience community, because of its ability to complement the collection of geographic information coming from traditional sensing technologies. However, the involvement of a crowd of volunteers, potentially untrained or nonexperts, implies that VGI can be of varying quality. Tracing VGI provenance enables the recording of the collection activity; the information about who gathered what, where and when can then be employed to judge the VGI quality. In this paper, we focus on the adoption of a provenance-based Human Computation approach to aggregate and consolidate VGI. We discuss the representation, inference and publication of Human Computation VGI and its provenance. As more and more of those community-based data collection efforts happen on the Web, we propose the adoption of Semantic Web technologies, through employing an ontological formulation to capture provenance and by following Linked Data principles to publish provenance data on the Web.