Visualisation and Communication of VGI Quality

The flourishing of VGI projects has transformed the average web user into an eager geographic data user and contributor. As it is difficult for the crowd to perceive VGI quality, visualisation can play a critical role in communicating data quality. At the same time, although VGI quality has been a prominent research topic for scientists, quality visualisation has not been exploited to its full potential. Since the crowd encompasses a diverse pool of users, VGI quality visualisation caters for different needs and exhibits variable functionality, operating as an awareness tool for the novice user as well as an exploration tool for the expert user / scientist. The scope of this chapter is to present a framework for VGI quality visualisation that takes into account factors such as methods for quality visualisation of spatial data, the nature of VGI data quality, user profiles and the visualisation environment. In addition, a review of the available methods for data quality visualisation, which have emerged from cartography, is presented, and a number of guidelines for VGI quality visualisation are proposed, taking into account user characteristics.