Reconceptualizing the role of the user of spatial data infrastructure

Spatial data infrastructures, which are Internet-based mechanisms for the coordinated production, discovery, and use of geospatial information in the digital environment, have diffused worldwide in the last two decades. Currently, there are about one hundred spatial data infrastructures at the national level and many other at supra- and sub-national levels. These contemporary spatial data infrastructures operate with two main assumptions: formal organizations are the producers and suppliers of geospatial information; users are the passive recipients of information. The recent phenomenon of volunteered geographic information departs from these assumptions. In this paper, we argue that reconceptualizing the user of a spatial data infrastructure can accommodate this new phenomenon. Such a reconceptualization creates a middle ground between spatial data infrastructure and volunteered geographic information, which has important implications for future research.     

Confronting the data-divide in a time of spatial turns and volunteered geographic information

Geography is enjoying a period of unparalleled visibility, driven by the growing use of geographic methods and concepts across the sciences and humanities—the so-called spatial turn—and the pervasive use of geospatial Web technologies and their concomitant influence on society, especially the phenomenon of volunteered geographic information (VGI). The field of public health is beginning to harness spatiality with gusto; however, the geospatial Web and its social phenomena are underexplored in this context even though they may be particularly useful for public health enquiry, especially in low-resource settings that lack traditional data collection mechanisms. A case study framed within these two current phenomena is presented to illustrate the influence of geography and its potential for addressing the data-divide—the disparity in availability of data for scientific enquiry and decision-making most felt in low-and middle income countries. A facilitated VGI data collection initiative collected public health-related injury data in Cape Town, South Africa, as a pragmatic alternative given the lack of data from traditional sources. Emergency medical services personnel interacted with a GeoWeb interface to volunteer their informed opinions of high-incident injury locations. Previously unrecorded injury location data were created, and combined with traditional injury data for use in an ongoing study examining the environmental determinants of injury in this setting, which speaks to the possibility for hybrid authoritative/asserted data collection strategies. This study speaks to the growing influence of geography and one of its driving forces, the techno-social revolution in geospatial technology and data. Future work should continue to examine their potential to address the data-divide.     

Visualizing the relationship between geographic and social media network space

This research explores the relationship between geographic and social media network space. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to perform a geo-enhanced network analysis and to create an example social media network using a select location identified in the study area as important in the results of the geo-enhanced network analysis. A straightforward, non-technical example is provided to the readers on how location data and social media network data can be overlaid to visualize potential local firm to firm and firm to customer connections in geographic and social media network space. An example of how to identify these potential connections locally through social media networks using Twitter is demonstrated. By considering the geographic location in network structures, it is possible to convey the role distance plays in discerning prospective local social media marketing partners, and also track the spread of information flow through social media networks.

     

Volunteered geographic information: future research directions motivated by critical, participatory, and feminist GIS

New interactive web services are dramatically altering the way in which ordinary citizens can create digital spatial data and maps, individually and collectively, to produce new forms of digital spatial data that some term ‘volunteered geographic information’ (VGI). This article examines the early literature on this phenomenon, illustrating its shared propositions that these new technologies are part of shifts in the social and technological processes through which digital spatial data are produced, with accompanying implications for the content and characteristics of geospatial data, and the social and political practices promoted through their use. I illustrate how these debates about VGI conceive of spatial data as socially embedded, and suggest ways in which future research might productively draw upon conceptualizations from participatory, feminist, and critical GIS research that have emerged from similar foundations.     

Privacy, reconsidered: New representations, data practices, and the geoweb

Blogging, social networking, and other Web 2.0 practices have sparked widespread debate about the status and future of privacy. This paper examines an explicitly geographical aspect of Web 2.0 with respect to these debates: the geospatial web, or ‘geoweb’. As part of fundamental shifts in the kinds of geographic information available, its circulation, and representative forms it assumes, the geoweb implies new objects of privacy concern and subsequent privacy-related negotiations over the aggregate of its component information, technologies, and data praxes. Thus we argue that privacy must not only be revisited, but indeed re-conceptualized. Whereas prior research on privacy vis-à-vis geographic information technologies has tended to question what privacy ‘is’, we focus instead on the constitutive outcomes of societal struggles over privacy. We examine how privacy is being negotiated around two geoweb services - Google Street View and the Twitter GeoAPI - to illustrate that these contestations produce privacy as a social object in particular ways. We show that public discourse around actual or anticipated privacy harms stemming from geoweb services and their uses, as well as the preventatives and remedies proposed or implemented to address such harms, reconstitute the objects and practices of privacy concern, and alter the roles and relationships of state, civil and corporate actors in the construction of privacy. Finally we suggest that the geoweb raises new privacy concerns because some of its representational forms - namely geo-tagged images and self-authored texts - facilitate identification and disclosure with more immediacy and less abstraction.     

The credibility of volunteered geographic information

The proliferation of information sources as a result of networked computers and other interconnected devices has prompted significant changes in the amount, availability, and nature of geographic information. Among the more significant changes is the increasing amount of readily available volunteered geographic information. Although volunteered information has fundamentally enhanced geographic data, it has also prompted concerns with regard to its quality, reliability, and overall value. This essay situates these concerns as issues of information and source credibility by (a) examining the information environment fostering collective information contribution, (b) exploring the environment of information abundance, examining credibility and related notions within this environment, and leveraging extant research findings to understand user-generated geographic information, (c) articulating strategies to discern the credibility of volunteered geographic information (VGI), including relevant tools useful in this endeavor, and (d) outlining specific research questions germane to VGI and credibility.     

Geospatial analyses of alcohol and drug problems: empirical needs and theoretical foundations

Over the past four decades geospatial analyses of alcohol and drug problems have moved to the forefront of ecological studies of the correlates and determinants of drug addictions in community health. These advances have been predicated upon the expanding computational capabilities of geographic information systems, advancement of statistical tools for the analysis of spatial data, and the formulation of suitable social ecological theory. This paper provides an introduction to the study of drug markets in the US as a model social problem for geospatial research and analysis. Market and epidemic models of the growth of the methamphetamine abuse and dependence in California are used as examples of two fruitful approaches to understanding the social processes that underlie use of this dangerous substance. Data on the growth of the epidemic are described and used to motivate theoretical and empirical concerns regarding further analyses of the development of drug markets over space and time. These concerns, in turn, begin to be addressed by the remaining four papers in this series, each providing some examples and insights into avenues of geospatial research which can be profitably explored in the future.     

Volunteered geographic information and networked publics? Politics of everyday mapping and spatial narratives

The issue of a changing public that undertakes and underpins Volunteered geographic information (VGI) practices has not been discussed in depth in the existing literature. This paper seeks to tackle this issue of publics regarding the intersection between VGI and public participation GIS. I draw upon the notion of “networked publics” to illustrate the complexities of social relations intersecting with VGI practices. Networked publics involve a connected set of social and technological developments associated with the growing engagement with digitally connected media. Networked publics embody several major characteristics including multiple memberships spanning over vast locations and possibilities for horizontal connections and bottom-up engagements. I argue that the emergence and proliferation of VGI reflect the major characteristics of networked publics. Through two examples of VGI constructions in China, I depict types of networked publics involved in these processes. I show that the mutual constitution of networked publics and sociopolitical and technological transformations has produced new landscapes of civic engagement in China. I also show the limits and challenges of these VGI practices in this context. As such, this study contributes to the efforts of theorizing the geoweb through conceptualizing and foregrounding these new forms of social relations and interactions engaging with VGI practices, which in turn may entail new forms of knowledge production and politics.     

Mapping the data shadows of Hurricane Sandy: Uncovering the sociospatial dimensions of ‘big data’

Digital social data are now practically ubiquitous, with increasingly large and interconnected databases leading researchers, politicians, and the private sector to focus on how such ‘big data’ can allow potentially unprecedented insights into our world. This paper investigates Twitter activity in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in order to demonstrate the complex relationship between the material world and its digital representations. Through documenting the various spatial patterns of Sandy-related tweeting both within the New York metropolitan region and across the United States, we make a series of broader conceptual and methodological interventions into the nascent geographic literature on big data. Rather than focus on how these massive databases are causing necessary and irreversible shifts in the ways that knowledge is produced, we instead find it more productive to ask how small subsets of big data, especially georeferenced social media information scraped from the internet, can reveal the geographies of a range of social processes and practices. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods, we can uncover broad spatial patterns within this data, as well as understand how this data reflects the lived experiences of the people creating it. We also seek to fill a conceptual lacuna in studies of user-generated geographic information, which have often avoided any explicit theorizing of sociospatial relations, by employing Jessop et al.’s TPSN framework. Through these interventions, we demonstrate that any analysis of user-generated geographic information must take into account the existence of more complex spatialities than the relatively simple spatial ontology implied by latitude and longitude coordinates.     

Diversity in volunteered geographic information: comparing OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia in Jerusalem

While the term “volunteered geographic information” (VGI) has become a buzzword in debates on the geoweb, online cartography and digital geoinformation, the scope and reach of VGI remains underexplored. Drawing on literature on social implications of VGI, this article, firstly, explores differences between VGI initiatives at the example of a comparative case study on social biases within data of OSM and Wikimapia in the fragmented social setting of Jerusalem, Israel. The results of this analysis turn out to be highly contradictive between both projects, which challenges widely accepted assumptions on the imprint of social inequalities and digital divides on VGI. This observation guides, secondly, a discussion of diversity within the category of VGI. Arguing that mapping communities, data formats and knowledge types behind VGI are extremely dissimilar, the paper proceeds by questioning the consistency and utility of VGI as a category. Seeking for a more comprehensive typology of VGI, Edney’s notion of cartographic modes will be presented as an approach towards a more contextualized understanding of VGI projects by embracing their underlying cultural, social and technical relations. Consequently, the paper suggests empirical research on the cartographic modes of a broad series of VGI projects through qualitative and quantitative methods alike.     

Building a semantic based public transportation geoportal compliant with the INSPIRE transport network data theme

Interoperability is becoming essential for the today’s geographic information systems. Geographic information is usually available as datasets stored in databases and accessible via GIS. However, these information sources are increasingly heterogeneous and show differences in data formats, database schema and object concepts. To satisfy the increased demand for the use and sharing of geographic data in common applications, considering the heterogeneity and the methods to support interoperability are required by the GIS community. The implementation of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) such as the European INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) enables accessibility and the sharing of geographic data and interoperability among the systems. In addition to this, traditional GIS systems perform spatial queries using a keyword-based method. However, this approach remains incapable of fully expressing the users' needs due to a lack of geographic concepts (semantics) in the dataset. Different terms may refer to similar concepts, while the same terms may refer to different concepts. This causes semantic heterogeneity in the dataset. In this context, the most promising approach is the implementation of geospatial semantics by means of ontology in the geospatial dataset to overcome this kind of ambiguity. The aim of this research is to investigate the implementation of INSPIRE as a SDI standard and the use of Semantic Technology to empower the traditional GIS approach. In this regard, a public transportation geoportal has been developed for the experimental investigation which uses a revised sample transportation data complaint with the INSPIRE Transport Network Data Theme and a developed Transportation Ontology Domain, including concepts, relationships and individuals to provide a semantic spatial search.     

Volunteered Geographic Information constructions in a contested terrain: A case of OpenStreetMap in China

The recent explosive growth of user-generated geographic information has drawn significant attention from GIS scholars and human geographers. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) here refers to a key component of such a phenomenon, comprising both a range of practices of geographic information production and dissemination by volunteers as well as new forms of geospatial data produced and curated through various interactive online platforms and mobile devices such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Google Maps. VGI constructions have raised questions on spatial knowledge, power, and context. Through a study that examines social constructions of OSM in China, this paper makes two contributions to the existing literature: providing a political economic account of VGI constructions in China and exploring legalities in VGI research. Informed by research in critical GIS, this paper traces political economic transitions in relation to OSM constructions and examines OSM contributors' experiences and how these experiences constitute OSM development and usage. Drawing upon law and society research, this paper investigates how OSM mappers encounter the state's regulatory scheme of online mapping. This legality perspective of spatial data production and usage is a topic rarely explored in VGI studies. With interview data and document analysis, this paper unravels processes of powerful state institutional arrangements to control and invest in VGI simultaneously, entrepreneurs' interest in developing location-based services using VGI data, and experiences from a tech-savvy group in exploring and making VGI. While individual experiences vary, they show efforts of questioning embedded power relations shaping spatial data production in these continuously evolving, contested technoscientific and social landscapes.     

Geospatial data: a key ingredient for Swiss Re’s underwriting and service tools

As a leading global reinsurer, Swiss Re deals with many hazards and risks for which geospatial data are crucial in order to obtain reliable assessments of expected insured losses or large losses from catastrophes. Typically, such data are used in combination with insurance data either in pricing tools to calculate premiums, tail risks and more, or in mapping tools. In natural perils pricing applications—the most important group of tools—geospatial data are usually “not visible” but are instead used to create probabilistic event sets. For example, a flood event set may define spatially if and how frequently a given location is flooded. Mapping tools, such as Swiss Re’s CatNet^® (www.swissre.com/catnet), visualize the data in the form of maps which include many useful attributes per geographic location.

     

Using small cities to understand the crowd behind OpenStreetMap

As businesses and governments integrate OpenStreetMap (OSM) into their services in ways that require comprehensive coverage, there is a need to expand research outside of major urban areas and consider the strength of the map in smaller cities. A place-specific inquiry into the OSM contributor sets in small cities allows an intimate look at user motives, locations, and editing habits that are readily described in the OSM metadata and user profile pages, but often missed by aggregate studies of OSM data. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from the OSM history of five small cities across North and South America, I show that OSM is not accumulating large local corpuses of editors outside of major urban areas. In these more remote places OSM remains largely at the mercy of an unpredictable mix of casual contributions, business interests, feature-specific “hobbyists”, bots, and importers, all passing through the map at different scales for different reasons. I present a typology of roles played by contributors as they expand and fix OSM in casual, systematic, and automated fashion. I argue that these roles are too complex to be conceptualized with the traditional “citizen as sensor” model of understanding volunteered geographic information. While some contributors are driven by pride of place, others are more interested in improving map quality or ensuring certain feature types are represented. Institutions considering the use of OSM data in their projects should be aware of these varied influences and their potential effects on the data.     

Spatialities of data: mapping social media ‘beyond the geotag’

As emerging sources of so-called ‘big data’ are increasingly utilized in order to understand social and spatial processes, so too have these new data sources become the subject of harsh criticism from more critically-oriented geographers and social scientists. This paper argues that one of the major issues preventing a more productive dialogue between critical human geographers and those already engaging in the mapping and analysis of these new data sources is around the ways that space and spatiality are conceptualized in social media mapping. As such, this paper draws on and extends earlier critiques of the ‘spatial ontology of the geotag’, in which the geographic analysis of geotagged social media data over-privileges the single latitude/longitude coordinate pair attached to each individual data point, often leading to the kind of simplistic mappings and interpretations prevalent today. The goals of this paper are two-fold: first, to demonstrate how the spatial ontology of the geotag is implicitly operationalized within mainstream social media mapping exercises, and how this understanding of space remains incongruent with existing conceptions of space drawn from human geography. Second, using the example of tweeting in the wake of the August 2014 killing of an unarmed African–American teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, this paper demonstrates how a more geographically-situated analysis of this kind of data, inspired by relational or multidimensional conceptualizations of space, can yield alternative understandings of the social processes embedded in such data.     

New approaches to environmental monitoring: the use of ICT to explore volunteered geographic information

Citizen participation in environmental monitoring is not a new idea. However, recent developments in information and communication technologies (ICT), such as the social web and the miniaturization of sensors, have created new opportunities to promote citizen participation in environmental monitoring. The analysis of existing citizen initiatives that use ICT tools, identified the need for a framework conceptualizing ways to increase the contribution of volunteered geographic data in environmental monitoring. Environmental Collaborative Monitoring Networks (ECMN) are proposed in this paper as a framework that combines the concepts of traditional environmental monitoring networks with the ideals of the open source movement. Such framework can guide the creation of fixed and mobile monitoring networks and is organized based on three building blocks: (1) Motivated Citizens; (2) Sensing Devices; and (3) Back-End Information Infrastructure. To illustrate the issues involved in the implementation of the building blocks of ECMN, the Senses@Watch project is presented, which explored the use of sensory data as a source of monitoring data.     

Geographic media literacy: an introduction

In a media saturated world of globalization, information flow and knowledge economies, an interesting paradox exists: geographic literacy appears to be on the decline while geographic information is on the rise. In this introduction to a collection of essays on geographies of the media, we explore this paradox and use Baudrillard’s (1994) work on Simulacra and Simulation to argue that increased mediated information does not produce more meaning, but rather leads to a catastrophe of meaning and the medium. Drawing from McLuhan’s axiom, “the medium is the message,” we posit that with more mediated information there is less meaningful information and as such we need to address geographic media literacy as a primary mode through which to address geographic literacy.

Geospatial analysis of surface hydrological parameters for Kyushu Island,Japan

Defining the surface hydrological parameters represents a crucial factor for the sustainable development purposes. In areas with heavy precipitation and rugged topography, these parameters control the occurrence of some natural hazards, from which the flash flood gets the most attention. Traditional methods for the assessment of the surface hydrological parameters are costly, time-consuming and provide information for limited geographic extent. On the other hand, remotely sensed data provide a cost-effective, rapid and wide aerial coverage with adequate accuracy. Geospatial analysis of these remotely sensed data provides a suitable and effective method for the reconnaissance determination of the surface hydrological parameters. In this work, digital elevation models, Landsat 8 satellite images as well as digital maps of soil and land use for Kyushu Island were acquired and analyzed using geographic information system. Surface hydrological parameters were determined in terms of watershed boundaries, soil moisture, initial abstraction as well as flash flood potentiality. Results of this research show a great correlation with historical flash flood events that occurred in the island. The northern parts of the island are subjected to the threat of flash floods. A follow-up is recommended in some areas on the island. As a conclusion, the geospatial analysis performs an accurate reconnaissance method for hydrological analysis at regional scale, which in turn guides the detailed field observation saving time and cost.

     

Seismic interferometry and ambient noise tomography in the British Isles

Traditional methods of imaging the Earth's subsurface using seismic waves require an identifiable, impulsive source of seismic energy, for example an earthquake or explosive source. Naturally occurring, ambient seismic waves form an ever-present source of energy that is conventionally regarded as unusable since it is not impulsive. As such it is generally removed from seismic data and subsequent analysis. A new method known as seismic interferometry can be used to extract useful information about the Earth's subsurface from the ambient noise wavefield. Consequently, seismic interferometry is an important new tool for exploring areas which are otherwise seismically quiescent, such as the British Isles in which there are relatively few strong earthquakes. One of the possible applications of seismic interferometry is ambient noise tomography (ANT). ANT is a way of using interferometry to image subsurface seismic velocity variations using seismic (surface) waves extracted from the background ambient vibrations of the Earth. To date, ANT has been used successfully to image the Earth's crust and upper-mantle on regional and continental scales in many locations and has the power to resolve major geological features such as sedimentary basins and igneous and metamorphic cores. Here we provide a review of seismic interferometry and ANT, and show that the seismic interferometry method works well within the British Isles. We illustrate the usefulness of the method in seismically quiescent areas by presenting the first surface wave group velocity maps of the Scottish Highlands using only ambient seismic noise. These maps show low velocity anomalies in sedimentary basins such as the Moray Firth, and high velocity anomalies in igneous and metamorphic centres such as the Lewisian complex. They also suggest that the Moho shallows from south to north across Scotland which agrees with previous geophysical studies in the region.     

Landslide investigations in Russia and the former USSR

The impact of natural hazards on mankind has increased dramatically over the past decades. Global urbanization processes and increasing spatial concentrations of exposed elements induce natural hazard risk at a uniquely high level. To mitigate affiliated perils requires detailed knowledge about elements at risk. Considering a high spatiotemporal variability of elements at risk, detailed information is costly in terms of both time and economic resources and therefore often incomplete, aggregated, or outdated. To alleviate these restrictions, the availability of very-high-resolution satellite images promotes accurate and detailed analysis of exposure over various spatial scales with large-area coverage. In the past, valuable approaches were proposed; however, the design of information extraction procedures with a high level of automatization remains challenging. In this paper, we uniquely combine remote sensing data and volunteered geographic information from the OpenStreetMap project (OSM) (i.e., freely accessible geospatial information compiled by volunteers) for a highly automated estimation of crucial exposure components (i.e., number of buildings and population) with a high level of spatial detail. To this purpose, we first obtain labeled training segments from the OSM data in conjunction with the satellite imagery. This allows for learning a supervised algorithmic model (i.e., rotation forest) in order to extract relevant thematic classes of land use/land cover (LULC) from the satellite imagery. Extracted information is jointly deployed with information from the OSM data to estimate the number of buildings with regression techniques (i.e., a multi-linear model from ordinary least-square optimization and a nonlinear support vector regression model are considered). Analogously, urban LULC information is used in conjunction with OSM data to spatially disaggregate population information. Experimental results were obtained for the city of Valparaíso in Chile. Thereby, we demonstrate the relevance of the approaches by estimating number of affected buildings and population referring to a historical tsunami event.