A Proximity-Based Semantic Enrichment Approach of Volunteered Geographic Information: A Study Case of Waste of Water

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) refers to geospatial data that is collected and/or shared voluntarily over the Internet. Its use, however, presents many limitations, such as data quality, difficulty in use and recovery. One alternative to improve its use is to use semantic enrichment, which is a process to assign semantic resources to metadata and data. This study proposes a VGI semantic enrichment method using linked data and thesaurus. The method has two stages, one automatic and one manual. The automatic stage links VGI contributions to places that are of interest to users. In the manual stage, a thesaurus in the hydric domain was built based on terms found in VGI. Finally, a process is proposed, which returns semantically similar VGI contributions based on queries made by users. To verify the viability of the proposed method, contributions from the VGI system Gota D’Agua, related to water waste prevention, were used.