Assessing the potential of web 2.0 volunteered geographic information in social networks for the crowdsourcing platform “geo-wiki.org”

In recent years, volunteered geographic information has become a major source of open information in a mobile society, spanning different thematic areas like e.g. common mapping (OpenStreetMap), emergency and crisis response (ushahidi) or in global landcover validation like geo-wiki.org. The Geo-Wiki Project[0] is a global network of volunteers who wish to help improve the quality of global land cover maps. Basis for the assessment are local knowledge, aerial photographs and satellite derived land cover classification. However, in remote areas, information from these sources may be rather poor. Geo-wiki intends to enhance the information available for these areas by harnessing additional georeferenced information which is becoming available via web 2.0: social media like e.g. panoramio, youtube, twitter and flickr allow to georeference their media by coordinates and tagging by specific keywords, making it a potential source of additional information for the assessment of global landcover. Objective: Assess the potential use of georeferenced information in social media by integrating and testing the „web2.0 broker“ (developed by L. Diaz et al, [4]) in geo-wiki.org. Test and develop appropriate keywords to filter the plethora of web 2 information available and to extract information which is tailored to improve information on land cover. For a master thesis, assess multilingual taxonomies used in social networks to tag media covering land cover as a topic.