Kolloquium Geoinformatik On the relationship of space and content of volunteered geographic information

Within recent years, there has been a significant progress of the World Wide Web, which evolved to become the so-called Web 2.0. The most important feature of this new quality of the WWW is the participation of the users in generating content. This trend facilitates the formation of user communities which collaborate on diverse projects, where they collect and publish information. The portion of the resulting User-generated content, which is directly or indirectly geospatially referenced, is often termed more specifically volunteered geographic information (VGI). The existence of this type of information opens new opportunities for (GIScience) research. The first part of the talk addresses the question for which share of (not only geo-) information there exists a relationship between space and content of the information, such that the information is locatable in geospace. In this context, the assumption that about 80% of all information has a reference to space has been well known within the community of geographic information system users since the early 1980s. In the second part of the talk the question is investigated in how far volunteered geographic information that is produced on mobile devices is related to the locations where it is published. For this purpose, a collection of microblogging-texts produced on mobile devices has served as research corpus.