## 4 Future Trends
[114] proved in their study that for some areas, the majority of OSM data was collected by external contributors, whose home location was more than 1000 km away from the area in which the data was contributed. It can be assumed that these data contributions are made through tracing aerial imagery, and prior studies have shown that this mapping behavior can lead to an overrepresentation in the geometry of a feature or to missing feature descriptions, such as street names or other information [20,100,114]. Thus, more detailed analyses are needed to determine whether external or remote members provide data with a better, equal or worse quality when contributing to the project. Additionally, [PERSON] _et al_. [151] revealed that contributors oftentimes add information on different scales due to the resolution of the aerial imagery that is available. Similar to the work by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [152], who presented a first approach to calculate the level-of-detail of different OSM features, it needs to be investigated how the scale of the contributed geo-information can potentially be used for VGI quality assessment. The geographic scope of prior VGI analyses had a strong focus on areas in Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States. One of the aforementioned studies [114] highlighted in a first comparison of selected urban areas of the world that factors, such as population density and income, can have an influence on data contributions and community efforts in the different selected regions. [PERSON] [116] also pointed out that the digital divide could highly influence the mapping activities in less developed countries. Thus, a strict distinction between the developments of VGI in different geographic world regions and the analysis of potential socio-economic or cultural influential factors could give a better understanding about the individual motivations to contribute to a VGI project for each world region. Due to the discrepancies in contributor concentration around the world in VGI projects, such as OSM, sometimes, the particular area of interest does not contain the required data or data types that the user would like to implement in a desired project. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [90] demonstrated that based on the availability of different feature types in OSM, other missing geographic objects, such as land use information, can be derived. Future research could investigate this process in more detail to see what type of additional geographic features can be derived based on existing objects in the dataset. A different approach that combines and enriches current datasets through data conflation of multiple sources has been the focus of many researchers in recent years. It needs to be noted that licensing conventions, such as the ODbL license in OSM, can be a hindrance in these cases, due to the limitations of the license, whereas other VGI data sources with fewer restrictions, such as geolocated images on Flickr or Panoramio, or tweets on Twitter, could help to improve proprietary or governmental datasets [4]. One of the major concerns that arose in recent years about the OSM project is the lack of detailed and complete address information. Adding this information is a tedious process that does not give contributors the same type of satisfaction as the collection of roads and buildings that are visualized in the projects map. However, how can this issue of missing or incomplete data in VGI projects be solved? Several companies have been supporting the development of a number of tools to display incorrectly mapped information in OSM or that help the contributor to simply collect the required data types. A study has shown that services operating on OSM have a regulative and quality assuring effect [37]. The study, conducted in 2008, showed that the number of topology network errors was reduced after an online route planner based on OSM data was available.