Volunteered geographic information systems: Technological design patterns

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) has been studied extensively within various contexts, however, generally focusing on isolated aspects of data. Therefore, we still need to advance the structured knowledge of the mechanisms that affect and support its creation. This article aims to contribute to the integrated study of VGI systems (VGIS) in order to enhance design processes that lead to a more systematic and efficient VGI management. We define VGIS, their main components, and general architectures. Then, we use the service blueprinting technique to conduct the case study of several systems, identifying system actions to find the processes and technologies forming the different functional components of VGIS: elements of the technological infrastructure that implement diverse processes to facilitate participation and data management. Integrated in the data collection component, we also propose a typology of crowdsourcing tasks that-coupled with the functional components-establishes a foundation for VGIS research and design. We characterize these components, arguing that they are necessary in the development of VGIS, however, there is still a need for a more detailed study of the flow of processes and subprocesses and how they work under the criteria of different types of projects to continue facilitating their design.