While I was at JRC, I shared office with Frank Ostermann. Each one worked in different projects but we found our ways to discuss and share our own ideas. One of these ideas was to analyse and investigate to what extent VGI was being used in disaster management situations. What is its intended used?  Can VGI be used for other purposes other than data collection? Which are the next steps to leverage VGI in disaster management scenarios? As a result, we investigated research papers using VGI and geo-social media in the disaster management context, and came up with a classification schema to extract some insights on the relationship among VGI sources, focus, intended use and analysis methods being used.

We learnt that most studies investigated challenges and potential solutions at earlier phases of data analysis such as data preparation, data handling, merging, finding missing values, cleaning, annotating, filtering and so forth.  There was a clear preponderance of data-centric studies, and much lesser studies focused on socio-technological issues or advanced applications, which still put a secondary focus on data preparation and exploration. This trend highlighted that VGI research is still very much technology-driven as opposed to theory- or application-driven treatment of the topic VGI in GIScience.

The paper full citation is:

Granell, F. O. Ostermann. Beyond data collection: Objectives and methods of research using VGI and geo-social media for disaster management. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 59: 231-243, 2016, ISSN 0198-9715. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2016.01.006, post-print at http://hdl.handle.net/10234/162470