2010/11/01 by Muki Haklay, Mordechai (Muki) Haklay, Sofia Basiouka +2 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Data Management and Algorithms #Geographic Information Systems Studies #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.1179/000870410x12911304958827
crossref issued 2010/11/01 · crossref published 2010/11/01 · crossref published-print 2010/11/01 · openalex publication_date 2010/11/01 · crossref created 2010/12/21 · crossref published-online 2013/07/18 · crossref deposited 2016/12/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
title/>In the area of volunteered geographical information (VGI), the issue of spatial data quality is a clear challenge. The data that are contributed to VGI projects do not comply with standard spatial data quality assurance procedures, and the contributors operate without central coordination and strict data collection frameworks. However, similar to the area of open source software development, it is suggested that the data hold an intrinsic quality assurance measure through the analysis of the number of contributors who have worked on a given spatial unit. The assumption that as the number of contributors increases so does the quality is known as ‘Linus’ Law’ within the open source community. This paper describes three studies that were carried out to evaluate this hypothesis for VGI using the OpenStreetMap dataset, showing that this rule indeed applies in the case of positional accuracy.