Computing Model of Volunteered Geographic Information Trustworthiness Based on User Reputation

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is a new kind of geospatial data collected by non-professional volunteers, and it will lead to uncertainty of its credibility. At present, little research works focuses on VGI quality according to its contributor's reputation. This paper proposes integrating user reputation with VGI trustworthiness. A user reputation model is put up at first, which aggregates initial reputation and experience reputation of contributor. Then, a computing model of VGI trustworthiness is developed, which take factors such as the editing process of geographic feature, reputation of contributors and so on into consideration. At last, historical polyline data from OpenStreetMap is employed for experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the quality of polyline features has high positive correlation with its trustworthiness. In this paper, VGI is assessed by means of its trustworthiness, which offers a fresh perspective for evaluating and screening VGI.