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<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Evaluating Reputation in VGI-enabled Applications</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Marco Gusmini</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Nafaâ Jabeur</string-name>
          <email>nafaa.jabeur@gutech.edu.om</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">3</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Roula Karam</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Michele Melchiori</string-name>
          <email>michele.melchiori@unibs.it</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Chiara Renso</string-name>
          <email>chiara.renso@isti.cnr.it</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">4</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Dept. of Inf. Engineering, Università degli Studi di, Brescia</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Brescia</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="IT">Italy</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Dept. of Inf. Engineering, Università degli Studi di, Brescia</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Brescia</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="IT">Italy</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff2">
          <label>2</label>
          <institution>Dept. of Inf. Engineering, Università degli Studi di, Brescia</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Brescia</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="IT">Italy</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff3">
          <label>3</label>
          <institution>German University of, Technology in Oman (GUtech)</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Athaibah, Sultanate of</addr-line>
          <country country="OM">Oman</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff4">
          <label>4</label>
          <institution>ISTI, CNR</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Pisa</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="IT">Italy</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is an approach to crowdsource information about geospatial objects around us, as implemented in Open Street Map, Google Map Maker and WikiMapia projects. The value of this content has been recognized by both researchers and organizations for acquiring free, timely and detailed spatial data versus standard spatial data warehouses where objects are created by professionals with variable updating time. However, evaluating its quality and handling its heterogeneity remain challenging concerns. For instance, VGI data sources have been compared to authoritative geospatial ones on speci c regions/areas in order to determine an average overall quality level. In user-oriented VGI-based applications, it can be more relevant to assess the quality of particular contents, like speci c Points of Interest. In this case, evaluation can be performed indirectly by reputation scores associated with the speci c content. This paper focuses on this last aspect. Our contribution primarily provides a comprehensive model and architecture for reputation evaluation aimed to assess quality of VGI content. On the other hand, we also focus on applications by discussing two motivating scenarios for reputation-enhanced VGI data in the context of geospatial decision support systems and in recommending tourist itineraries.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. INTRODUCTION</title>
      <p>
        Following the Web 2.0 trend, more and more content
published on the Web is generated by end users. Due to the
growing availability of Geographic Positioning System
(GPS)enabled mobile devices, this user-generated content is
commonly associated with geographical coordinates. This
feature is more and more recognized as relevant by researchers
and organizations [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11 ref14">14, 11</xref>
        ]. Recent platforms, including Open
Street Map (OSM) and Wikimapia, permit users to
contextualize the content of these maps. These platforms make it
easy interacting with the map content through some editing
functions, such as add and edit. These activities are known
as volunteered geographical information (VGI). VGI could
provide more timely, updated and detailed content than
authoritative sources. Moreover, unlike commercial
geospatial sources, VGI contents have a special value because they
are able to capture multiple perspectives of the same
location as perceived by di erent users from di erent cultural
backgrounds (e.g., a Buddhist temple could be depicted as
a touristic attraction or a religious location; a street with
speed bumps can be a described a potential danger by a
motorbike user and as a safe street by a pedestrian one).
      </p>
      <p>
        The process of VGI generation is intrinsically subjective
and loosely controlled; it relies very often on devices having
variable level of precision and on untrained volunteers. As a
consequence, VGI data are highly heterogeneous in coverage,
density and quality. Techniques to estimate and improve the
quality of these data are therefore needed [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15 ref2 ref9">2, 9, 15</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        A classi cation of approaches for assessing the quality of
VGI have been discussed in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. Other approaches, as in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ],
aimed to establish the average quality of VGI data on
speci c regions/areas by comparing it with authoritative data
and measuring the existing discrepancies in terms of
standard quality metrics such as completeness, consistency and
both positional and temporal accuracy. However, knowing
the quality of speci c VGI data, like description and
location of a speci c point of interest (PoI), is more relevant for
user-oriented applications focusing on the description of
particular geospatial objects. In these cases, there is the need
to know whether to trust or not the VGI description.
Examples are applications providing information on location of
architectural barriers [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ] or potability of water wells [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        Therefore, de ning quality indicators for VGI data and,
speci cally, PoIs is relevant and various ones have been
proposed [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ]. Indicators focus on aspects in uencing the
quality without measuring it directly. Some of them are: lineage
(which relies on the history and evolution of the dataset
describing, for example, a PoI), quality of textual
descriptions [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ], experience [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ], trustworthiness and reputation [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        In this paper, we provide a contribution to the VGI
research which is twofold. Firstly, we discuss two motivating
applicative scenarios for reputation-enhanced georeferenced
data in the context of geospatial decision support systems
and in recommending tourist itineraries. Then, we present
and evaluate a comprehensive model and some preliminary
experiments for evaluating reputation in user-generated
georeferenced data. This contribution extends and re nes our
previous work [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ] by including time and other features in
the model. The paper connects its contribution to the
challenges arising in linked data management, by leveraging
OpenStreet Map, Wikimapia, Panoramio, or Googlemaps
datasets. The described approach could be implemented
with Linked Data and, as future direction, it can become a
use-case for the recent work on Open Annotation1.
      </p>
      <p>The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section 2, the applicative scenarios are presented to show
the potentiality of integrating reputation scores and
usergenerated georeferenced data in speci c applications. Some
related work is discussed in Section 3. In Section 4, we
present our multi-layer architecture to enhance VGI
reputation. In Section 5, the Reputation Model is proposed. The
paper concludes in Section 6 with some suggestions for a
future model extension and our research roadmap.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>MOTIVATING SCENARIOS</title>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>VGI in Spatial Decision Support Systems</title>
      <p>
        Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSSs) are being
created to allow several stakeholders to collaboratively plan
their actions. In such systems, Spatial Data Warehouses
(SDWs) are extensively deployed as common repositories
where stakeholders' data sources are integrated and stored [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ].
In order to load data into a SDW, a complex
Extract-LoadTransform (ETL) process is typically used. Because of the
growing complexity in several real-life scenarios,
decisionmakers are relying more on advanced technologies to
collect data anytime, anywhere, about events and objects of
interest. As these technologies became widely available as
wearable and portable devices (e.g., smartphones),
decisionmakers are increasingly soliciting individuals to actively
report on ongoing events. Several tools are therefore being
created to enable VGI datasets to be acquired within the
context of SDSSs. The creation of such tools is motivated
by the important role of VGI techniques in collecting
on-they valuable data, improving the understanding of ongoing
events, discovering behavioural patterns that would improve
decision-making processes, and implementing proper
mechanisms to provide individuals with customized services.
Although some progress is being achieved, several obstacles
are still challenging the e orts of integrating VGI
capabilities within SDWs. For instance, the VGI datasets are
commonly unstructured, with varying qualities, formats, and
granularities. In order to meet the DW requirements,
ex1http://www.openannotation.org/.
      </p>
      <p>Module. As this investigation is expected to happen frequently, assigning reputation
values to VGI participants and contributions is a relevant option. These values are
used to prioritize data loading into the SDW and relieve this process from unnecessary
costly processing activities.</p>
      <p>Spatial Data Warehouse (SDW) Creation Platform</p>
      <p>Archive Data
Sources (DS)
Spatial</p>
      <p>Data
Warehouse
Integration Module</p>
      <p>Extract-Transform-Load
(ETL) Module
…..</p>
      <p>ETL1
ETLp</p>
      <p>ETL2
Data Transformation</p>
      <p>Module
….. DS 1
DS n</p>
      <p>DS 2
Data Loading Scheduler
Reputation
Database</p>
      <p>Reputation Module</p>
      <p>VGI Repository</p>
      <p>Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) Platform
tensive transformation e orts must be performed prior to
sending the VGI datasets to the ETL process. These e orts
are supported in our architecture (See Fig. 1) by the
Integration Module. Furthermore, since VGI datasets are
voluntary collected by experts, non-experts, and even malicious
individuals, their values, credibility, veracity, and
trustworthiness will be investigated by our Reputation Module. As
this investigation is expected to happen frequently,
assigning reputation values to VGI participants and contributions
is a relevant option. These values are used to prioritize data
loading into the SDW and relieve this process from
unnecessary costly processing activities.
2.2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Recommending sigthseeing tours with Tripbuilder</title>
      <p>
        Tourists approaching their destination for the rst time
deal with the problem of planning a sightseeing itinerary
that covers the most subjectively interesting attractions while
tting the time available for their visit. TripBuilder2 is
an unsupervised system helping tourists to build their own
personalized sightseeing tour [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]. Given the target
destination, the time available for the visit, and the tourist's pro le,
TripBuilder recommends a time-budgeted tour that
maximizes tourist's interests and takes into account both the time
needed to enjoy the attractions and to move from one PoI to
the next one. A distinctive feature of TripBuilder is that
the knowledge base feeding the recommendation model is
entirely and automatically extracted from publicy available
crowdsourced data like Flickr3 and Wikipedia4.
      </p>
      <p>TripBuilder extracts from Wikipedia the multilingual
name of the PoI, its geographic coordinates, the categories
of the PoI according to a category. By clustering and
spatially matching tourists' photo albums from Flickr on the
relevant PoIs extracted from Wikipedia pages, we can thus
derive a knowledge base that represents the behavior of
people visiting a given city. The Wikipedia categories of the
PoIs visited by a given tourist are used to build her pro le
and to characterize the trajectories across the PoIs.</p>
      <p>However, Wikipedia as a source of PoIs for tourism
recom2http://tripbuilder.isti.cnr.it
3http://www. ickr.com
4http://www.wikipedia.com
mendations has some limitations. For example, several areas
of the world, like latin-america or asian countries, are not
covered by a su cient number of Wikipedia pages
describing individual tourist attractions inside a city like museums
or monuments. This means that in these areas the PoIs are
too sparse to describe itineraries and thus we need to rely
on other, possibly local, sources of crowd data. This calls
for the integration of local-based, up-to-date, user-generated
and reliable Volunteer Geographical data source capable to
describe the Points of Interests, crucial for expanding
Tripbuilder in these areas. The integration of these data
requires a reputation evaluation mechanism to ensure that the
user-generated data are reliable enough for recommending
tourists.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>RELATED WORK</title>
      <p>
        Several research and development works have attempted
to estimate reputation in VGI applications. For example,
Bishr and Khun [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] described a reputation model based on
coherence between volunteers' reports on potability of
water wells in developing countries. The potability status has
only two possible values: good or bad. Time is explicitly
included in the model. For instance, trustworthiness in the
reports about potability is reduced proportionally to the
elapsed time since the creation time of reports. Our model
considers more general VGI scenarios allowing for complex
descriptions of objects. Another approach is given in Zhao
et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ]. The approach estimates the trustworthiness of
VGI data based on contributor's reputation as well as on
analyzing several versions of VGI data. This is similar to the
approaches proposed by Ke ler et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ] and D'Antonio
et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ]. Each version is created by a contributor and
describes the current status of a geospatial object. The level of
trust for a speci c version depends on: (i) contributor's
reputation; (ii) similarity distance between this version and the
previous one for the same object; and (iii) level of trust in the
previous version. This approach looks actually inspired by
D'Antonio et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ], but additionally it provides a detailed
data model. As per our model, these authors distinguish
between implicit and explicit assessment of contributors.
      </p>
      <p>
        Trustworthiness and reputation have been studied in other
contexts, for example crowdsourcing [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ] and multi-agent
systems [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ]. In particular, the work [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ] is about
trustworthiness of semantic annotations of textual contents. The
discussion is interesting because it considers as not avoidable
some levels of disagreement in users' annotations for the
same text. A particular annotation is considered
acceptable when the disagreement with other annotations is not
exceeding a given level. In fact, in some cases, this situation
re ects the presence of semantic ambiguity in the described
object, which can be perceived and annotated by di erent
users according to di erent points of view.
      </p>
      <p>
        Our approach aims to provide a comprehensive
evaluation model for reputation in VGI. It extends our previous
work by including temporal aspects in uencing reputation
and the asymmetry of feedbacks, as proposed too in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ]. It
distinguishes as well between direct and indirect user
feedbacks. Another bene t of our contribution is to be resistant
to manipulation attempts done by users with a malicious
attitude. Some preliminary experimentation provides
encouraging results in this direction.
      </p>
      <p>Layer of Users
Layer of
Evaluations
Layer of Versions
VGI Sources
Real world objects</p>
      <p>Reputation
User a score a = ...</p>
      <p>Reputation
User b score b = ...</p>
      <p>Reputation</p>
      <p>User c score c = ...</p>
      <p>Modification
Feedback (+/-)</p>
      <p>Completion</p>
      <p>Modification
VeVrserIsDI,DO_bi,jOUbRjIURI
&lt;attr, value&gt;
&lt;&lt;aattttrr,_iv1a,luveal&gt;ue_i1&gt;
&lt;&lt;aattttrr,_iv2a,luveal&gt;ue_i2&gt;
&lt;attr_…i3, value_i3&gt;
… Reputation
score i = ...</p>
      <p>Vers ID, Obj URI
Vers ID_j, Obj URI
&lt;attr_j3, value_j1&gt;
&lt;a&lt;tatrt_trj2_j,3v,avlualeu_ej2_j&gt;1&gt;
&lt;a&lt;tatrt_trj3_j,2v,avlualeu_ej3_j&gt;2&gt;
&lt;attr_j3…, value_j3&gt;
… Reputation</p>
      <p>score j = ...</p>
      <p>...</p>
      <p>VGI Repository</p>
      <p>VGI Repository</p>
      <p>Reputations</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>AN ARCHITECTURE FOR REPUTATION</title>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>ENHANCED-VGI</title>
      <p>
        In this section, we present a multi-layer architecture (see
Fig. 2) for VGI enhanced with reputation scores. This
architecture brie y introduces the main concepts of our model
for reputation evaluation. Main focus of this paper is the
layer of evaluations and, secondly, the layer of versions.
According to [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ] a VGI version is the description of a state
of a geospatial real world object at a certain time and
authored by a user. For the same state more versions can be
produced, as well as the state of an object can change during
the object lifespan (e.g., its address can change) making out
of date previous versions describing it. We model a version
(e.g., the description of a georeferenced PoI or a element on
a map, as a street) as set of pairs &lt; attribute; value &gt; with
a URI identifying the described object and can be completed
or modi ed many times. Versions are stored in VGI
repositories, like OSM and WikiMapia. In order to improve an
existing version, a user shall modify or complete it to
originate another version for the same object. In Fig. 2, versions
stored in the same repository and describing the status of
an object are grouped together. A user can also give a
direct feedback, positive or a negative, to versions in order to
express agreement or disagreement on the content.
      </p>
      <p>We consider four user activities as below: A user can: (i)
create a new version, (ii) modify an existing version, (iii)
complete an existing version, or (iv) give a direct feedback
to a version.</p>
      <p>A completion is a set of pairs &lt; attribute; value &gt; added
to an existing version (e.g., adding &lt;phone2, +39303333020&gt;
to the version). A modi cation consists of new values for
pairs &lt; attribute; value &gt; already existing in the version
(e.g., the pair &lt;opening, Monday-Friday&gt; corrects &lt;opening,
Monday-Saturday&gt;). Every time a user makes a modi
cation (respectively, a completion) to a version A, a new
version A' is generated from A by substituting the original with
the modi ed content (respectively, by adding content). For
each version (e.g., A, A'), its creation time is stored with the
version. A reputation value in [0; 1] is associated with each
user and each version. Modi cations, completions and direct
feedbacks on A modify both the reputations of the version
A and of the author of A. In Fig. 2, reputation scores of
authors and versions are stored and managed by a separated
platform from the VGI source repositories.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>REPUTATION EVALUATION MODEL</title>
      <p>In this section, we describe some requirements we adopted
for reputation evaluation and we provide the metrics. Our
purpose is to formalize an evaluation model based on our
multi-layer architecture by taking into account a set of
requirements we consider important for quantifying
reputation. According to the architecture in Fig. 2, presented in
the previous section, a user can perform activities to
produce georeferenced content (i.e., versions) and to evaluate
other peers' content. In our approach, these activities are
subject to constraints. For example, a user is not allowed
to give directly a feedback to another user and he cannot
evaluate more than once a version. This is set in order to
prohibit a malicious user from deliberately increasing
reputation of other speci c peers or their contents. Reputation
of versions does not depend only on feedbacks, considered
as direct evaluations, but also on modi cations and
completions, which we consider kind of indirect feedbacks. In
fact, we assume that a modi cation reduces the reputation
because the user producing it considers the original version
as including errors or requiring updates. On the contrary, a
user making a completion to a version recognizes it as
correct, but incomplete. Therefore, a completion activity has
to increase the reputation of the original version.
In the following, we formalize the metrics.</p>
      <sec id="sec-8-1">
        <title>User reputation.</title>
        <p>Every time a feedback, completion or modi cation are
made on a version, the User reputation score of its author is
updated as follows:
uRu =
(
(1</p>
        <p>uR0
e n) P OSu+NEGu + e n uR0</p>
        <p>P OSu
(1)
where uRu 2 [0; 1]. The rst case of Eq. (1) applies when
no activities have been made yet to any versions authored
by user u, i.e., P OSu = 0 and N EGu = 0. The term uR0 is
the initial user reputation, usually set to a low value (e.g.,
0.3) equal for every user. Alternatively, this value could
be set proportionally to the completeness in lling the user
registration pro le. In the second case of Eq. (1),
parameter n is the total number of versions produced by user u.
This includes new versions and versions produced due to
the modi cations or completions of other versions. The role
of coe cient e n is to reduce the amplitude of the initial
oscillations of the uRu value when n is low (e.g., n &lt; 3).
This avoids that a single positive or negative feedback can
increase or decrease considerably the reputation uRu when
a user has produced only few versions. Moreover, as n
increases the initial reputation uR0 counts less and the user
reputation score depends more on the feedbacks provided by
other users.</p>
        <p>De nition of terms P OSu and N EGu are as below:
P OSu =</p>
        <p>P OSv h(tv)</p>
        <p>N EGu =
v2V (u)
v2V (u)
(2)
where V (u) is the set of contributions produced by u and
v is one version. P OSc and N EGc are terms de ned in
the following and summarizing, respectively, positive and
negative feeedbacks expressed on v. h(tv) is a coe cient
weighting the contribution of P OSv and N EGv and depends
on the creation time tv of v.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-8-2">
        <title>Aging of versions.</title>
        <p>The coe cient h() assigns a higher weight to feedbacks
expressed on recent versions. Its value decreases linearly
with the di erence between the time t, when the P OSu and
N EGu expressions are evaluated, and the creation time tv
of version v. In particular, h(tv) is equal to 0 when this
di erence is larger than value . For example, in our
experiments we have chosen equivalent to 180 days so the
feedbacks on a version are no more changing the author's
reputation when the version is older than 180 days. This
coe cient is de ned as:
h(tc) =
(
(t tv)
0
if t tv &lt;
if t tv
where h(tc) 2 [0; 1]. Because P OSv and N EGv are always
positive then P OSu and N EGu are positive as well.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-8-3">
        <title>Reputation of versions.</title>
        <p>The reputation score vRv of a version v is based on
(implicit and explicit) feedbacks given to v by other peers.
vRv =
(
(1</p>
        <p>vR0
e k) P OSv+NEGv + e k vR0</p>
        <p>P OSv
where vRv 2 [0; 1] and k is the number of feedbacks on v.
The rst case in Eq. (4) applies when k = 0. In the second
case, when k 6= 0, reputation score vRv is de ned according
to an expression similar to the one for user reputation score,
as in Eq. 1.</p>
        <p>The initial reputation vR0 2 [0; 1] depends on the type of
activity (new version, modi cation, completion) to create v
and on the reputation of its author u, as follows:
vR0 =
8
&gt;
&lt; (1</p>
        <p>uRu</p>
        <p>Sim(v; vP rev)) uRu+
&gt;: Sim(v; vP rev) min(vRvP rev; uRu)
if vers(v)
otherwise
(5)
where vers(v) is true when v is a new version and, in this
case, the initial reputation vR0 is set to be equal to the
reputation uRu of the author. Otherwise, vR0 is a weighted
mean of: (i) the author reputation uRu, and (ii) the
minimum between reputation of the parent contribution vP rev,
which v is obtained from by modi cation or completion, and
uRu. The rationale for selecting the minimum is the
following. If reputation of vP rev is high and uRu is low, a user u
could maliciously modify a version with high reputation in
order to produce a version v with some wrong content (e.g.,
a di erent web site address) but having initially a high
reputation. By taking the minimum, this cannot happen since
(3)
(4)</p>
        <p>Correct Identi cations (U)
90%
70%
50%
(a)
the user reputation uRu is the upper bound of the initial
reputation of v. Sim(v; vP rev) 2 [0; 1] is a similarity
coefcient between the previous and the current version. More
these versions are dissimilar (i.e., Sim(v; vP rev) 0), more
the reputation score is near to the author's reputation score
uRu and therefore independent of the reputation of vP rev.
This is because the version v modi es signi cantly vP rev
so the reputation of v should be more focused on the
author than on the previous version vP rev. We will not detail
here how to calculate Sim(v; vP rev). It is proportional to
the number of pairs &lt; attribute; value &gt; equal in both the
versions v and vP rev.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-8-4">
        <title>Feedback evaluation.</title>
        <p>The values of P OSv and N EGv, summarizing the
positive and negative amount of direct and indirect feedbacks
on version v, are updated every time a new feedback on v is
produced. The impact of a feedback by a user uf is
proportional to reputation of uf . In particular, the equation for
updating the current P OSv when either a positive feedback
or a completion f is submitted by uf with reputation uRf ,
is the following:</p>
        <p>P OSv0 = P OSv+
!
(
uRf</p>
        <p>if f is pos. feedback (6)</p>
        <p>Sim(v0; v) uRf if f is completion
In case of completion, v0 denotes the upgraded version of v
after this operation. More the versions v and v0 are similar,
higher the increasing of P OSv due to the presence of the
similarity coe cient Sim(v0; v). The rationale is that if v0
is very di erent from v, it is not considered a completely
positive evaluation of v, i.e., v was evaluated as incomplete.
In this case, P OSv0 has not to di er a lot from P OSv.</p>
        <p>We de ne as well the equation for updating N EGv when
either a negative feedback or a modi cation f is submitted
by uf with reputation uRf :
N EG0v = N EGv+
(1
!)
(
uRf</p>
        <p>if f is neg. feedback
(1</p>
        <p>
          Sim(v0; v)) uRf if f is modi cation
(7)
Finally, to note that the coe cient ! 2 [0; 1] in Eq. (6) and
in Eq. (7) permits to make asymmetric the way P OSc and
N EGc are increased by a certain feedback. By assigning a
low value to !, a negative feedback increases more N EGv
than a positive one does on P OSv. Here we include in the
model a notion of asymmetry between positive and negative
feedback as Bishr and Khun [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ], who observe that negative
feedbacks in real life have a stronger absolute impact on
reputation than positive ones and therefore should be weighted
di erently.
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-8-5">
        <title>Experimental evaluation.</title>
        <p>We discuss some preliminary experimental results to test
our approach. Even if these experiments are limited the
obtained results are encouraging. We implemented the
reputation model as described in the previous section and tested its
accuracy on a simulated dataset in a Matlab environment.</p>
        <p>In our simulation, a user is labeled either cooperative
or non-cooperative and versions are labeled either correct
(i.e., supposed to represent correctly the reality) or
incorrect. During the simulation, cooperative users can: (i)
create correct versions, and (ii) perform activities on existing
versions that are coherent with their nature; which means if
a version they evaluate is correct then they can give either a
positive feedback or complete it. Non-cooperative users,
instead, behave according to a malicious attitude. They can:
(i) create incorrect versions, (ii) give either negative
feedbacks or modify correct versions, to reduce the reputations
of versions and authors. Moreover, a user can be active by
performing any type of action, or non active, by giving direct
feedbacks only.</p>
        <p>By running some simulations, we measure the accuracy
of the reputation model in identifying correctly, i.e.,
according to the labels, cooperative/non-cooperative users and
correct/incorrect versions. We recall that the objective of
the proposed reputation model is to assign high reputation
scores to cooperative users and to correct versions, or low
reputation scores otherwise. At the end of a simulation, a
cooperative user is identi ed correctly if the reputation score
is in the interval [0:5; 1]; a non-cooperative user is identi ed
correctly if the reputation score is in the interval [0; 0:5].
We use the same criteria for identi cation of versions. In
the experiment, we want to observe this phenomenon by
varying the number of cooperative users. We also disregard
some features like the asymmetry of feedbacks (i.e., we set
! = 0:5) and the aging of versions (i.e., we set h(tc) = 1).
The result permits to show good levels of accuracy even in
a simpli ed version of the model. All the numerical results
presented in the following are obtained as averages of ten
running simulations. We set the percentage of active users
to 10%. Therefore, the remaining 90% of users are non
active ones. Approximately, this proportion re ects the one
between active users, contributing as reviewers, and users
giving only feedbacks, with reference to the Amazon
community5. In our simulations, active users are selected randomly
among others. The type of an activity performed during the
simulation is chosen randomly based on the probability
distribution: creation of a new version, 1%; modi cation, 1%;
completion, 1%; direct feedback, 97%. The results concerning
the amount of users identi ed correctly is shown in Fig. 3(a).
The result concerning the amount of identi ed versions is in
Fig. 3(b).</p>
        <p>We can notice the high identi cation performances with
5https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-buyerswrite-reviews-on-Amazon
percentages of cooperative users of 90% and 70%. The
results are even better if we consider the correct identi cation
of only versions having at least 5 feedbacks, where with 70%
of cooperative users, we got 92:2% of correct identi cations
(not reported in the gure). On the contrary, with only
50% of cooperative users the performances drop down. In
this case, the number of cooperative and non-cooperative
users are the same and every user has the same initial
reputation score uR0, so the model is not able to identify who
is cooperative and who is not.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-9">
      <title>CONCLUSIONS AND PERSPECTIVES</title>
      <p>In this work, we discussed a novel comprehensive model
and architecture for reputation evaluation of Volunteered
Geographic Information content. An initial evaluation based
on simulations has been presented, as well. Our approach
de nes metrics to score a composite reputation of VGI data
coming from unknown contributors. We promote the
usefulness of our model by discussing the integration of VGI data
with reputation scores in two di erent application scenarios.
Future work includes dealing with inconsistency that may
arise due to repeated updates and completions for the same
PoI. We are also planning to perform a deeper evaluation of
the model, studying its possible joint use with other
techniques for quality assessment in VGI data, and improving
the architecture and the model in order to better integrate
them with the discussed applicative scenarios.</p>
    </sec>
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