A Systems Perspective on Volunteered Geographic Information
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is geographic information collected by way of crowdsourcing. However, the distinction between VGI as an information product and the processes that create VGI is blurred. Clearly, the environment that influences the creation of VGI is different than the information product itself, yet most literature treats them as one and the same. Thus, this research is motivated by the need to formalize and standardize the systems that support the creation of VGI. To this end, we propose a conceptual framework for VGI systems, the main components of which—project, participants, and technical infrastructure—form an environment conducive to the creation of VGI. Drawing on examples from OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, and RinkWatch, we illustrate the pragmatic relevance of these components. Applying a system perspective to VGI allows us to better understand the components and functionality needed to effectively create VGI.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it