A study of volunteered geographic information (VGI) assessment methods for flood hazard mapping: A review

Abstract

Floods are known as frequent and destructive global events that are caused by natural and human factors. Beside traditional methods, flood hazard mapping has been empowered by spatially enabled cell phones and web mapping technology which are feed by user generated data. This user generated information or Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), becomes the first point of response during any natural disaster. Since this information is created by volunteers, its reliability and credibility issues bring restriction on use of them as main source of information. The available methods of VGI credibility assessment mainly focus on meta data analysis, VGI spatial pattern analysis and comparison of VGI data with reference data. This paper thoroughly discusses recent development in these three groups of VGI assessment methods. At the end we highlighted several research gaps and potentials of combining and improving these methods to support flood hazard mapping.