Two new DFG projects on VGI, OSM Quality and Social Media Analysis

recently we were happy to receive the notification that two new research projects will be funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) the German main funding agency for fundamental research.
Both projects belong to the DFG Priority Programme “Volunteered Geographic Information: Interpretation, Visualisation and Social Computing“ (SPP 1894).
The two projects are:


A:) IntrisicOSMquality: A framework for measuring the fitness for purpose of OpenStreetMap data based on intrinsic quality indicators

In this project, we attempt to develop a framework that provides in a systematic way the methods and measures to evaluate the fitness for purpose of OSM data. A main objective is that this shall also be usable when there is no (authority) reference data for comparison is available, in order to make it applicable in a wide range of situations and extending the traditional approaches on spatial data quality evaluations based on comparison with other data sets.

B:) Spatial Correlations in Social Media Data – Identification and Quantification of Spatial Correlation Structures in Georeferenced Twitter Feeds
This proposal aims to contribute methodological advancements, whereby we focus on Twitter data. Specifically, we aim to explore novel ways to derive spatial correlation structures within social media feeds. Our work builds upon the mature theory of spatial autocorrelation, which is the traditional way of measuring spatial structure. Overall, our research will enable for gaining an increased and detailed understanding of social activities and their respective spatial mechanisms through improved methods allowing to analyse representations of these within socio-technical systems.