Volunteered metadata: standards, encodings and mobile tools for assessing fitness-for-purpose

Reliability of VGI is a hot topic, and it is commonly suggested that validation and quality assessment of data may also be crowdsourced. Initiatives which archive the history of features and tags (e.g OpenStreetMap) lend themselves to some mapping of disputed features, but among citizen science projects in general there is often limited scope for users to comment on their own or others’ submissions in a consistent way which may be translated to any of the currently accepted geospatial metadata standards. At the same time, platforms which allow the publication of more ‘authoritative’ datasets, (e.g. Geonode and ArcGISOnline), have introduced the option of user comments and ratings. Volunteered metadata (on both authoritative and VG information) is potentially of huge value in assessing fitness-for-purpose, but some form of standardization is required in order to aggregate diverse ‘opinions’ on datasets and extract the maximum value from this potentially vital resource. We discuss standards, schemas and tools which may assist in this aggregation, including the developing OGC User Feedback model, its potential encodings in RDF, XML and JSON-LD, and the ‘MyGEOSS Feedback’ app which allows dynamic comment on datasets relevant to a user’s current position.