New questions and a changing focus in advanced VGI research

The first eight articles which follow this editorial comprise a special issue (‘Role of Volunteered Geographic Information in Advancing Science’) and provide an exciting demonstration of the maturity of research on volunteered geographic information (VGI). When the term was first proposed in 2007 (Goodchild, 2007), it was with the belief that VGI provided a new alternative to the traditional production of geographic information, which had long been dominated by government agencies, academic research, and private corporations. The term emphasizes the role of volunteers, which brings echoes of an earlier era during the Age of Discovery when geographic features were named by individuals with no specific authority or qualifications, the naming of America being an especially notable example. The following decade has seen numerous developments impacting science and society. VGI is a form of crowdsourcing, and one of the many phenomena that mark the advent of neogeography. The rapid adoption and integration of geospatial and cyber technologies have prompted a phenomenal growth of the rate at which individual citizens are able to easily generate and openly share data. The arrival and rapidly increasing popularity of geographic exploration systems (such as Google Earth, Microsoft Bing Maps, and NASA World Wind) and social media platforms have quickly expanded the horizon from geographic exploration to a standard platform for the community to support global communication through geospatial information sharing. Moreover, the ever-increasing plethora of cyber social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google1, Foursquare, Instagram, and Flickr are generating and sharing dynamic information about their users’ locations and activities. Although recent advances in tools based on geospatial technology have enabled and inspired many individuals to include geography and the spatial representation of information in their personal and professional lives in ways they had not previously imagined possible, the initial uses of such information have largely been limited to gaining geographic awareness and “infotainment”. For example, following a search for a location-based service (such as restaurants and reviews, grocery stores, gas stations, movie theaters) and finding possible routes and modes of transportation to those locations, the creation and reading of reviews of those services by users far exceeds any other routine use of VGI. More recently, VGI output has increasingly been used as input for scientific research and applications. Citizen scientists are contributing to scientific research by engaging in observation, measurement, or computation. These individuals range from completely untrained but interested and motivated citizens to highly trained specialists with unique skill sets. The first group can offer tremendous volumes of data. The second, although more limited in number, can provide locationor field-specific details that may be very difficult for an individual or localized group to obtain. It has been pointed out that many contributors of VGI may not realize that they are doing so, and may not be aware of the detailed digital traces their movements are leaving, or of the vast amounts of personal data about them that now resides in the hands of corporations and intelligence agencies. Initial skepticism that volunteers were capable of providing accurate data led to extensive research on the quality of VGI, which in many cases proved to be at least as good as its authoritative equivalent. This collection marks a distinct departure from that earlier research, in which the initial questions are replaced by more advanced ones that are in many cases driving deeper into the more fundamental impacts of VGI. 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. We see, for example, the results