A quality comparison between professional and crowdsourced data in emergency mapping for potential cooperation of the services

Abstract

A protocol for assessing the quality of digital geospatial data is applied to samples of volunteered geographic information (created by Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team) and professional mappers (Copernicus EMS-rapid mapping). The application on pre-event data shows that a large percentage of them is very similar in terms of quality and is, therefore, potentially interchangeable; post-event data reveal a more divergent behaviour. The results gathered from the comparative analysis and a look at the temporal trends of response of volunteers and professionals justify a framework of interaction of respective activities, which seems to be possible under strong relationship between professionals and volunteers, built upon common operational standards and guidelines.

Keywords

• SEM
• crowdsourcing
• emergency
• data quality