This talk, held at the COST ENERGIC Working Group 3 Workshop, May 26, 2014, presents some example use cases for crowdsourced spatial data, highlights some barriers for adoption in industry and the public sector and finishes in more general terms with topics that would be of interest and an outlook on developments in conjunction with the concept of opening up (public administration's) data.

1. VGI/UGC: Uses, barriers and topics
Ralph Straumann, Ernst Basler + Partner
ralph.straumann@ebp.ch, http://www.ebp.ch/en
COST ENERGIC WG3 Workshop, 26.05.2014
CC-BY James Cridland

2. Example uses of VGI/UGC @ EBP
Walktimes using OSM data
COST ENERGIC WG3 Workshop on VGI and UGC 2

3. Example uses of VGI/UGC @ EBP
Viewpoints from SwissPeaks logging data
COST ENERGIC WG3 Workshop on VGI and UGC 3

4. Example uses of VGI/UGC @ EBP
COST ENERGIC WG3 Workshop on VGI and UGC 4

5. Example uses of VGI/UGC @ EBP
Cellphone data for traffic jam statistics
COST ENERGIC WG3 Workshop on VGI and UGC 5

6. Barriers to adoption
 Unfamiliarity
 (Unclear) licensing
 What happens to derived products?
 Informal nature of content:
 Spam, offensive content – in some
settings
 Spatial heterogeneity 
Use by officials
COST ENERGIC WG3 Workshop on VGI and UGC 6
Strava.com

7. Barriers to adoption
 Built-in biases, (perceived) quality
issues
 SLAs vs. undocumented, inofficial,
deprecated APIs
 Comparison with / availability of
official data
 Complexity
COST ENERGIC WG3 Workshop on VGI and UGC 7
Strava.com

8. Barriers to adoption
COST ENERGIC WG3 Workshop on VGI and UGC 8
Strava.com

9. What would be of interest?
In general, topics where:
 no (or bad) official data exists
 said data is prohibitively expensive
 data has to be comparable across
borders
 we are interested in informality
 (…)
COST ENERGIC WG3 Workshop on VGI and UGC 9
CC-BY Tim Parkinson

10. What would be of interest?
Examples:
 Movement data
 Mode of transport
 Metrics
 Socio-demography
 Purpose, goal
 Pooled near-realtime data
 Event detection, e.g. damage assessment wrt insurance claims
 Emergency operations
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11. Maybe a «Trojan horse» for VGI/UGC?
 Administrations familiarise themselves
with the «open» movement
 OGD is not perfect  triggers feedback
and interaction between stakeholders
… and OGD?
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OGD
VGI
UGC