The way geospatial information is produced and disseminated
has faced a tremendous change over the last decade, characterized
by the rise of VGI as the new, crowd-centric paradigm for
GIS-based applications. This study focused on the related issue of
public participation by investigating the VGI – and specially citizen
science – subset of participatory sensing, which is centered on the
use of mobile device sensors as key tools to perform scientific measurements.
The methodology adopted reflects also some distinctive
features of Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) practices.