Volunteered Geographic Information and Its Implications for Disaster Management

Communication technologies and approaches, such as mobile applications and social media enable individuals to share information with others ubiquitously. These voluntarily created data contain geographic information as well as user generated content such as images or text. Researchers and practitioners can gain highly valuable information by analysing and combining those different types of data. Earlier studies revealed that during disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, and bushfires, people want to help the affected ones and support emergency service agencies voluntarily. One way to do so, is to provide helpful information e.g. about the area or the situation on sight. Based on the derived information, emergency agencies might react faster and more efficient in such an extreme situation. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review on volunteered geographic information. One result of this work is, that attributes such as 'accuracy' and 'consistency' are mostly used as criteria for quality assessing, while other factors such as "trustworthiness" are not considered intensively.