Volunteered geographic information and crowdsourcing are two terms, which describe the use of information with a geographic description, provided by unorganized volunteers through various online tools. In the case of floods and earthquakes, a ten-year international practice of volunteered geographic information usage is presented. Various possibilities of such cooperation are shown: a) when such data are considered by professional researchers only as an input source, b) when they are used for voluntary mapping and c) when trained volunteers are treated as sensors and analysts. Despite the significant increase in the number of volunteers during this time, open issues of such data usage remain the same: how to animate enough volunteers to get the correct display of a natural disaster, how to exclude incorrect data, how to take into account the authorship of the data, and how to prevent the exclusion of those volunteers, which do not have access to the internet at the time of the accident.
COBISS.SI-ID: 9099617
In the years 2019–2022 we are conducting an applied research project L2-1826. The main intention of this project is to study how to acquire additional cartographic data for the national topographic map updating in the scales 1:5,000 and 1:50,000 with the help of volunteered geographic information (VGI) data gathering, especially volunteered images. An interactive orientation (monoplotting) enables acquisition of 3D-data from singe volunteered image by the help of dense digital elevation model. Based on our previous experience when we used singe volunteered images for the 2012 flood delineation, this project has the following main intentions: i) asses what kind of data, which can be useful for map updating in the scales 1:5,000 and 1:50,000, can be derived from volunteered images, ii) optimise the interactive orientation method (monoplotting) to enable a quick orientation of arbitrary single images obtained from volunteers by means of different dense digital elevation models or dense point clouds (in Slovenia we have free available aerial lidar data), iii) Perform a controlled VGI collection and processing, with a stress on volunteered images. Controlled VGI collection will enable analysis of the role of different cognitive strategies applied by the involved volunteers to better plan the future open VGI collection campaigns, analysis of the role of involved experts and non-experts in providing adequate images for topographic map updating, etc.