Quality assessment of professional and VGI geo-data in The Netherlands

Abstract

The increasing popularity of VGI datasets like Openstreetmap make it interesting to research what the quality of this type of geographic data is relative to professional geographic data. This research assesses the quality of two professional datasets (Google Maps and Locatus) and one VGI dataset (Openstreetmap) in the city of Utrecht, The Netherlands. Geographic data quality is classified in three main categories in order to systematically compare the quality of the three datasets. The first category is the intrinsic quality where the fundamental metrics are completeness, attribute accuracy and positional accuracy. The second category is the pragmatic quality which is determined by a use-case from the Healthy Urban Living project at the university of Utrecht. The third category is extrinsic quality which only applies to VGI data sources and is determined by the experience of the data producer. Overall, the quality of the Locatus dataset is relatively the highest in the study area where this dataset performs better in the analysis of the intrinsic and pragmatic quality compared to Google Maps and Openstreetmap. These datasets have a comparable intrinsic quality, but differ a lot in pragmatic quality which is moderate for Openstreetmap and poor for Google Maps. The extrinsic quality analysis of Openstreetmap results in high trustworthiness of this dataset in the study area, because almost all contributions in this area come from experienced mappers.