How Many Volunteers Does It Take To Map An Area Well? The validity of Linus’ law to Volunteered Geographic Information

The paper “How Many Volunteers Does It Take To Map An Area Well? The validity of Linus’ law to Volunteered Geographic Information“ has appeared in The Cartographic Journal. The proper citation for the paper is:

Haklay, M and Basiouka, S and Antoniou, V and Ather, A (2010) How Many Volunteers Does It Take To Map An Area Well? The validity of Linus’ law to Volunteered Geographic Information. The Cartographic Journal , 47 (4) , 315 – 322.

The abstract of the paper is as follows:

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.

To access the paper on the journal’s website, you can follow the link: 10.1179/000870410X12911304958827. However, if you don’t hold a subscription to the journal, a postprint of the paper is available at the UCL Discovery repository. If you would like to get hold of the printed version, email me.