The just published special issue of Transaction in GIS on “Role of Volunteered Geographic Information in Advancing Science” demonstrates the maturity of research on volunteered geographic information (VGI). As the guest editors summarised in their editorial “it is no longer important to demonstrate that VGI is capable of corroborating what we already knew. Rather, we are seeing VGI being used to answer new kinds of questions, representing real advances in geographic knowledge. VGI is producing new kinds of data that were never collected in the past, driven by specific human concerns.”

One of the eight papers included in the special issue is “Advancing Science with VGI: Reproducibility and Replicability of Recent Studies using VGI”, co-authored by University of Twente Frank Ostermann and GEOTEC member Carlos Granell. The paper is in reality a continuation of a previous joint paper on analytical methods and VGI applied to disaster management. Using the same set of papers (with a few additions) on the use of VGI in the crisis management field, we investigated the different aspects of reproducibility and replicability and their impact on VGI-related research, and examined the current situation in VGI-related research, and identify strategies to ensure realization of its full potential. Our results suggested that reproducibility issues related to data are a serious concern yet, while reproducibility issues related to analysis methods and processes face fewer challenges. However, since most studies still focus on analysing the source data, reproducibility and replicability are still an unsolved problem in VGI-related research

The paper full citation is:

Frank. O. Ostermann, Carlos. Granell. Advancing Science with VGI: Reproducibility and Replicability of Recent Studies using VGI. Transactions in GIS 21(2): 224-237, 2017, ISSN 1361-1682.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tgis.12195