Analysing commons to improve the design of volunteered geographic information repositories

Abstract

Commons are resources that belong to or affect an entire community. In a Web 2.0 environment, users interact and collaborate with each other to produce user generated content that belongs to the community, i.e. a commons. Web 2.0 implies that everyone with Internet access can join the user community. Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is a special case of user generated content. Web 2.0 technologies have enabled user generated commons, such as open source projects and Wikipedia; the former have been around since the late nineties, the latter was launched in 2001. VGI commons followed a few years later, with the advent of Google Maps, Wikimapia and OpenStreetMap. The communities that create the content, as well as the type of content, are quite different for open source projects, Web 2.0 encyclopaedias and VGI repositories; nevertheless, they share the fact that they are commons. We asked ourselves whether there is anything to be learnt for VGI repositories from the approaches, methodologies and technologies applied in open source projects and Web 2.0 encyclopaedias, which have been around for longer and have a larger user base. In this research paper we present the results of an analysis of three user generated commons: open source projects in general, Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. The findings suggest that there are indeed approaches and technologies that could be useful for VGI repositories, and surprisingly, also technologies from the other commons that can be useful to Wikipedia.