In this weeks BrownBag talk at the UCSB Spatial Center Dr. Andrea Ballatore gave a nice overview about vandalism in user generated geographic information. The talk referred to his recent paper on “Defacing the Map: Cartographic Vandalism in the Digital Commons“. There he outlines a typology of different kinds of map-based vandalism through a qualitative analysis of reported incidents in WikiMapia and OpenStreetMap. He also mentioned that our paper on detecting vandalism in OpenStreetMap is still the only automated approach of investigating this interesting issue. The resulting system “OSMPatrol” by Neis et al. (2012) is a rule-based approach that detects suspicious behaviour of editing patterns in OpenStreetMap taking the reputation of mappers into account. For example later work analysed contribution to OSM in several regions all over the world.
Neis, P.; Goetz, M.; Zipf, A. (2012): Towards Automatic Vandalism Detection in OpenStreetMap. ISPRS Int. Journal of Geo-Information, 1, 315-332.
