Hunter College geography seminar talk on November 18, 2013

1. Carsten Kessler
Hunter Geography Seminar ¦ Nov 18, 2013
GIS
r the
fo
sses!
ma
Volunteered
Geographic Information

2. Linked
Open Data
Participatory GIS
Disaster
Response
Volunteered
Geographic
Information

3. Volunteered... what?
Volunteered geographic information
(VGI) is the harnessing of tools to
create, assemble, and
disseminate geographic data
provided voluntarily by
individuals.
GIS
for the !
s
masse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGI
VGI
3

4. Volunteered... what?
•
User generated geographic content
•
Came up with Web 2.0
•
Affordable GPS devices
•
Free (both as in free thought and as in free beer)
•
Faster
•
Non-authoritative
•
Labeled VGI by Mike Goodchild in 2007
!
GIS
for the !
s
masse
Michael F. Goodchild (2007) Citizens as sensors: the world of
volunteered geography. GeoJournal 69(4): 211‒221
VGI
4

5. Some VGI Projects: WikiMapia
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
5

6. Some VGI Projects: Google Maps Maker
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
6

7. Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare,
Flickr ‒ VGI?
•
Commercial platforms
•
Geographic information is often only a byproduct
•
Still often considered VGI
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
7

8. GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
8
http://vimeo.com/62289901

9. Some VGI Projects: OpenStreetMap
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
9

10. OpenStreetMap
•
The elephant in the room!
•
Started in 2004 by Steve Coast at University College London
•
Now operated by OpenStreetMap Foundation
•
1.4 million registered users
•
About 2 billion nodes and 200 million ways mapped
•
Data used at Mapquest, CartoDB, Foursquare, MapBox, ...
•
OSM dataset for the whole planet is currently 400GB
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
10

11. Contributing to OpenStreetMap
•
Data imports
•
Record GPS tracks
and upload them
•
Heads-up digitizing
!
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
11

12. http://vimeo.com/31910541
12

13. GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
13

14. http://vimeo.com/9182869
14

15. Typhoon Yolanda
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
15

16. GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
16

17. VGI Research Topics
•
Data quality: How does OSM compare to agency data?
•
Motivation: Why do people do this?
•
Contribution patterns: 1% of the mappers do 99% of
the work
•
Integrating OSM data with normal geographic
information
•
Using VGI for disaster response
•
…
GIS
for the !
s
masse
!
VGI
17

18. Quality Assessment
Carsten Keßler and René Theodore Anton de Groot (2013) Trust as a Proxy Measure for the Quality of
Volunteered Geographic Information in the Case of OpenStreetMap. In Danny Vandenbroucke,
Bénédicte Bucher, and Joep Crompvoets: Geographic Information Science at the Heart of Europe.
Proceedings the 16th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, 14‒17 May 2013, Leuven,
Belgium. Springer Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography 2013: 21‒37.
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
18

19. Quality Assessment
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
19

20. Quality Assessment
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
20

21. Tracking Editing Processes
GIS
for the !
s
masse
Johannes Trame and Carsten Keßler (2011) Exploring the Lineage of Volunteered Geographic Information
with Heat Maps. GeoViz 2011, Hamburg, Germany.
VGI
21

22. Tracking Editing Processes
Carsten Keßler, Johannes Trame and Tomi Kauppinen (2011) Tracking Editing Processes in Volunteered
Geographic Information: The Case of OpenStreetMap. In Matt Duckham, Antony Galton and Mike
Worboys (Eds.): Identifying Objects, Processes and Events in Spatio-Temporally Distributed Data (IOPE),
workshop at Conference on Spatial Information Theory 2011 (COSIT 11). 12 September 2011, Belfast, Maine, USA.
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
22

23. VGI in Education
GIS
for the !
s
masse
Thomas Bartoschek and Carsten Keßler (2013) VGI in education: From K-12 to graduate studies.
In Daniel Sui, Sarah Elwood, and Michael Goodchild (Eds.): Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge.
Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in Theory and Practice, Part 3: 341‒360. Springer.
VGI
23

24. VGI in Education
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
24

25. Semantic Referencing in VGI
•
Current approach in OSM: key-value pairs, e.g. amenity=cafe
•
Not handy if you look for a certain function of a place:
•
•
•
Do they have wifi?
Do they offer lunch?
Proposal: Functional descriptions instead of feature types
Simon Scheider, Carsten Keßler, Jens Ortmann, Anusuriya Devaraju, Johannes Trame, Tomi Kauppinen,
Werner Kuhn (2011) Semantic Referencing of Geosensor Data and Volunteered Geographic Information.
In Naveen Ashish and Amit Sheth (Eds.): Geospatial Semantics and Semantic-Web: Foundations, Algorithms,
Applications. Springer book series, Semantic Web and Beyond: Computing for Human Experience,
Vol. 12, pp.27‐59.
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
25

26. Indoor VGI
•
Transfer the idea of OSM to indoor environments:
OpenFloorMap
•
Tool to capture and visualize indoor models in
OpenStreetMap
•
Project with 10 students for 2 semesters
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
26

27. GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
27

28. Indirect VGI
Carsten Keßler, Patrick Maué, Jan Torben Heuer and Thomas Bartoschek (2009) Bottom-Up Gazetteers:
Learning from the Implicit Semantics of Geotags. In Krzysztof Janowicz, Martin Raubal, and Sergei
Levashkin: Third International Conference on GeoSpatial Semantics (GeoS 2009). December 3‒4 2009,
Mexico City. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5892: 83‒102.
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
28

29. Indirect VGI
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
29

30. Indirect VGI
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
30

31. Wrapping up
•
VGI transfers the idea of the prosumer to geographic
information
•
Everybody can contribute ‒ no need to know a lot about GIS
•
Think about open vs. commercial
•
Technology in the hands of people has the potential to
produce data be used by everyone (not just those who can
afford a license)
!
GIS
for the !
s
masse
VGI
31

32. ank
Th
you!
Carsten Kessler
Hunter Geography Seminar ¦ Nov 18, 2013