Volunteered geographic services: developing a linked data driven location-based service

Abstract

The term Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) describes various layperson-based, geo-collaboration projects to collect, maintain, and visualize information. VGI has been successfully utilized in scenarios such as emergency response and is also increasingly integrated into commercial products. Based on an analysis of existing projects and research, we propose to extend the idea of VGI by introducing Volunteered Geographic Services (VGS). Instead of contributing information, volunteers can request or offer microservices to their local community. We provide a flexible server framework that handles service requests and offers. We also implement a smartphone application developed using Google's Android platform. The server and mobile client are realized following the Linked Data paradigm and using Semantic Web technologies. In this paper, we discuss the idea behind VGS, motivate it using two scenarios, and explain the technical realization.