VGI Imperfection in Citizen Science Projects and Its Representation and Retrieval Based on Fuzzy Ontologies and Level-Based Approximate Reasoning

The chapter investigates the kinds of imperfection affecting Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI) created by users eager to participate in some citizen science project. An approach based on the use of fuzzy domain ontologies and level-based approximate reasoning is suggested to represent and manage both the uncertainty of volunteers when describing their observations and the vagueness of ill-defined domain knowledge. This way one can model more reliable smart applications for creating VGI as well as can design less ambiguous spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) for sharing VGI with final stakeholders.