Design and Implementation Volunteered Geographic Information System for Gathering Agricultural Products Information

The importance of information has led researchers to look for the least cost and time ways to acquiring information. One of the newest mechanisms of acquiring and compiling geographic data is Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). This way saves time and money and can provide regularly updated geographic information that is difficult to obtain through remote sensing but can easily be collected by citizens on the ground. VGI refers to geographic information created by citizen volunteers. VGI has proliferated in recent years, mainly due to the technological advancements enabling the public to contribute geospatial data. One of the fields that we can use VGI is agriculture. In this way, every farmer, as a citizen volunteers, records the information of his agricultural lands. Now, field visits and satellite image processing are the two main ways to collect this information. Both of these methods are costly and time-consuming.  In this article, we propose a VGI system to gathering the type of cultivation information and the spatial boundaries of agricultural lands. For evaluation, the proposed approach was implemented for a study area and thatchr(chr('39')39chr('39'))s results were compared with the remote sensing method. The results show that the accuracy of the information gathered with the proposed method, which obtained 91% by the confusion matrix. This accuracy is approximately equal to the accuracy obtained from the remote sensing method; While the time and cost of this method are much less than the remote sensing method. Also, the precision of the collected data according to the confusion matrix for the four crops of corn, rice, wheat, and barley in this study were 0.91, 0.89, 0.86, and 0.91, respectively, the results were reliable. This shows the reliability of the results obtained from the VGI for different products.