TY - JOUR
T1 - Volunteered geographic information production as a spatial process
AU - Hardy, Darren
AU - Frew, James
AU - Goodchild, Michael F.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (Awards #BCS-0849625 ‘Collaborative Research: A GIScience Approach for Assessing the Quality, Potential Applications, and Impact of Volunteered Geographic Information’ and #IIS-0431166 ‘Collaborative Research: Integrating Digital Libraries and Earth Science Data Systems’) and the US Army Research Office (Award #W911NF0910302). We thank Wikimedia Deutschland, e.V. in Berlin, Germany, for providing the helpful Toolserver service (http://toolserver.org). They provided database access, web hosting, and computational resources for our study. Thanks to Tim Alder and Stefan Kühn for comments on geotagging methods in Wikipedia, and for sharing their data-mining software and results. Finally, we also thank Sarah Elwood, Danica Schaffer-Smith, Daniel Sui, and especially the anonymous reviewers for their comments.
PY - 2012/7
Y1 - 2012/7
N2 - Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit and a popular example of user-generated content that includes volunteered geographic information (VGI). In this article, we present three main contributions: (1) a spatial data model and collection methods to study VGI in systems that may not explicitly support geographic data; (2) quantitative methods for measuring distance between online authors and articles; and (3) empirically calibrated results from a gravity model of the role of distance in VGI production. To model spatial processes of VGI contributors, we use an invariant exponential gravity model based on article and author proximity. We define a proximity metric called a 'signature distance' as a weighted average distance between an article and each of its authors, and we estimate the location of 2.8 million anonymous authors through IP geolocation. Our study collects empirical data directly from 21 language-specific Wikipedia databases, spanning 7 years of contributions (2001-2008) to nearly 1 million geotagged articles. We find empirical evidence that the spatial processes of anonymous contributors fit an exponential distance decay model. Our results are consistent with the prior results on information diffusion as a spatial process, but run counter to theories that a globalized Internet neutralizes distance as a determinant of social behaviors.
AB - Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit and a popular example of user-generated content that includes volunteered geographic information (VGI). In this article, we present three main contributions: (1) a spatial data model and collection methods to study VGI in systems that may not explicitly support geographic data; (2) quantitative methods for measuring distance between online authors and articles; and (3) empirically calibrated results from a gravity model of the role of distance in VGI production. To model spatial processes of VGI contributors, we use an invariant exponential gravity model based on article and author proximity. We define a proximity metric called a 'signature distance' as a weighted average distance between an article and each of its authors, and we estimate the location of 2.8 million anonymous authors through IP geolocation. Our study collects empirical data directly from 21 language-specific Wikipedia databases, spanning 7 years of contributions (2001-2008) to nearly 1 million geotagged articles. We find empirical evidence that the spatial processes of anonymous contributors fit an exponential distance decay model. Our results are consistent with the prior results on information diffusion as a spatial process, but run counter to theories that a globalized Internet neutralizes distance as a determinant of social behaviors.
KW - Wikipedia
KW - distance decay
KW - geotagging
KW - user-generated content
KW - volunteered geographic information
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U2 - 10.1080/13658816.2011.629618
DO - 10.1080/13658816.2011.629618
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84864681952
SN - 1365-8816
VL - 26
SP - 1191
EP - 1212
JO - International Journal of Geographical Information Science
JF - International Journal of Geographical Information Science
IS - 7
ER -