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.     

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.     

When citizens choose not to participate in volunteering geographic information to e-governance: a case study from Mexico

Citizen participation is a crucial democratic practice in many western societies. In contemporary societies, different social agents utilise information and communication technology using Internet-based systems, to establish two-way communication in order to promote citizen participation. One such approach is volunteered geographical information (VGI). It is considered that VGI provides a new space for citizen engagement, as well as an arena for political contestation, however little attention has been paid to the reasons, drivers and limitations for voluntary citizen participation. Although there is an extensive literature on both VGI and citizen participation, this rarely considers how much citizen participation is necessary to run a VGI platform, what are the drivers for non-participation, and what happens within a democratic political space when citizens are apparently not interested to participate with a VGI deployment These topics are explored in this paper, through the lens of a particular case study of a University deployment for VGI developed in Mexico and a wider analysis of other VGI deployments taken from the literature. By critically assessing the extent to which the VGI deployments have enabled citizen participation, and the degree and quality of this participation, we draw conclusions as to how far and under what circumstances VGI can support government agencies to engage citizens in a meaningful dialogue as part of democratic governance initiatives. This leads us to identify key areas for further research by geographers and related social scientists exploring these socio-technical systems and their effects on democratic societies.     

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.     

Self-explanatory or just easy-to-use? A theoretical approach to the emancipatory potential of volunteered geographic information (VGI)

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) has fundamentally changed the way in which geoinformation is generated, distributed and handled. It entails manifold practices and discourses which are currently investigated from both affirmative and critical perspectives. Expanding on the range of theoretical approaches to VGI, this article explores the condition and the limits of VGI from a social theory perspective to explore the following questions: what is the basic structure of VGI both as a form of practice and a form of knowledge? What are aspects of integration and aspects of divergence with regard to VGI practices? Are there inherent limitations to VGI practices especially with regard to its emancipatory and educational potential? To approach these issues several established analytical frameworks are discussed, and a specific categorization of VGI’s symbolic geographies as interaction content will be introduced. Based on this categorization two opposed types of interaction practice can be distinguished: While information on VGI gathering and processing as a part of interaction content is vital to a competent use and deeper understanding of the system (“self-explanatory”) many interface designs have a very limited output in order to promote user-friendliness (“easy-to-use”). While the latter may increase the popularity of VGI it also limits interaction language to everyday language, to familiar spatial vocabularies of place, city, region, landscape or nation—instead of mediating technology’s spatialities or exploring more innovative ways of spatial representation.     

Using Volunteered Geographic Information to measure name changes of artificial geographical features as a result of political changes: a Libya case study

Over the past few years, political systems have changed in several countries of the Middle East as a result of citizen revolutions on the ruling regimes. These geopolitical changes have had effects on the names of artificial geographical features, such as roads and schools. Many of the names, especially those that were associated with previous regimes, were changed to become associated with the revolutions, their dates, their leaders, or their martyrs. The recent change in the paradigm of Web use towards data sharing and crowd-sourcing in the Web 2.0 provides new opportunities to get insight into a local community’s perception of political events. Crowd-sourced spatial data, often referred to as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), can be contributed and accessed through various websites and data repositories. These data can supplement traditional data sources, such as road maps hosted by governmental offices. Libya’s governmental maps of urban infrastructure are scarce and incomplete. This provides an incentive for citizens and grassroots groups to collect and generate spatial data on their own and to express changed realities of feature names by the means of crowd-sourced mapping. Using two districts in Libya this study evaluates for five Web 2.0 platforms (OpenStreetMap, Wikimapia, Google Map Maker, Panoramio, and Flickr) to which extent VGI reflects name changes of geographical features as a result of the revolution in 2011. Other data sources, such as school directories posted by teachers on Facebook, serve as additional information for feature name change detection. Results show that the extent to which VGI reflects name changes based on the 2011 revolution in Libya varies strongly between VGI data sources. VGI provides a useful supplement to limited governmental resources to better understand how names of artificial geographical features are affected by changes in political systems.     

The role of facilitated volunteered geographic information in the landscape planning and site design process

Over the last 40 years there has been a movement to increase opportunities for public participation in the decision and policy-making processes for design and planning projects. The emergence of online digital mapping systems and enhancements in Web technology to support sharing and collaboration have allowed the general public to generate their own spatial content via Web applications and other geospatially enabled devices. The resulting data from this recent phenomenon has been called Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). When facilitated through digital mapping interfaces, VGI can provide landscape architects and allied design professionals with local, detailed and spatial information that can be used to create a more informed design solution. This paper describes several digital interfaces the author has developed to elicit facilitated-VGI (f-VGI) over the past decade, and examines their use in community design projects and their lessons for implementing future f-VGI initiatives.     

Discovering points of interest from users’ map annotations

One of the potential problems of volunteered geographic information (VGI) is ensuring its quality. Innocent mistakes and intentional falsehoods can reduce not only the quality of the information, but also people’s confidence in VGI as a legitimate source of data. We present a case study in VGI that addresses the quality problem by aggregating input from many different people. Specifically, we present a technique to maintain a comprehensive list of points of interest (POI) for digital maps. This is traditionally difficult, because new POI are created, because some POI are known only locally, and because some POI have multiple names. We address this problem by exploiting map annotations contributed by regular, online map users. Our institution’s mapping Web site allows users to create arbitrary collections of geographically anchored pushpins that are annotated with text. Our data mining solution finds geometric clusters of these pushpins and examines the pushpins’ text and other features for likely POI names. For instance, if a given text phrase is mentioned frequently in a cluster, but infrequently elsewhere, this increases our confidence that this phrase names a POI. We tested the quality of our results by asking 100 local residents whether or not the POI we found were correct, and our user study told us we were generally successful. We also show how we can use the same user-annotated pushpins to assess the popularity of existing POI, which is a guide for which ones to display on a map.     

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.     

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.     

Opportunities provided by geographic information systems and volunteered geographic information for a timely emergency response during flood events in Cologne,Germany

The occurrence of disasters such as extreme flooding in urban environments has severe consequences, not only on the human population but also on critical infrastructures such as the road networks, which are of vital importance for everyday living and particularly for emergency response. In this article, our main goal is to present-conceptually and in praxis-a model that could be used from the emergency responders for timely and efficient emergency management and response in an urban complex environment. For the city of Cologne in Germany, we aim to indicate possible ways to decrease the emergency response time during an extreme flood scenario through the development of an accessibility indicator, which consists of different components. Therefore, we will investigate the opportunities that occur, in a flood risk scenario, from the use of geographic information in different forms such as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and open-source data in an ArcGIS environment, to increase urban resilience through the decreasing emergency response time. We will focus on network analysis for the fire brigades (first acting emergency responders) during a flood scenario to calculate their emergency response ranges and emergency response routes through flooded road networks, for the assistance of the possibly affected hospitals, refugee homes and fire brigades, which can be flooded. At the end of the paper, we suggest that the vulnerable community of the refugees could be taken into consideration as a new source of VGI, as an additional component that would lead to the decrease in the emergency response time. The geo-located information that could be provided by the refugee community can be very useful in emergency situations, such as those examined in this article where timely information can be forwarded to the proper authorities for a more focused and timely emergency response, increasing the resilience of the urban population and their community.     

Opportunities provided by geographic information systems and volunteered geographic information for a timely emergency response during flood events in Cologne,Germany

The occurrence of disasters such as extreme flooding in urban environments has severe consequences, not only on the human population but also on critical infrastructures such as the road networks, which are of vital importance for everyday living and particularly for emergency response. In this article, our main goal is to present-conceptually and in praxis-a model that could be used from the emergency responders for timely and efficient emergency management and response in an urban complex environment. For the city of Cologne in Germany, we aim to indicate possible ways to decrease the emergency response time during an extreme flood scenario through the development of an accessibility indicator, which consists of different components. Therefore, we will investigate the opportunities that occur, in a flood risk scenario, from the use of geographic information in different forms such as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and open-source data in an ArcGIS environment, to increase urban resilience through the decreasing emergency response time. We will focus on network analysis for the fire brigades (first acting emergency responders) during a flood scenario to calculate their emergency response ranges and emergency response routes through flooded road networks, for the assistance of the possibly affected hospitals, refugee homes and fire brigades, which can be flooded. At the end of the paper, we suggest that the vulnerable community of the refugees could be taken into consideration as a new source of VGI, as an additional component that would lead to the decrease in the emergency response time. The geo-located information that could be provided by the refugee community can be very useful in emergency situations, such as those examined in this article where timely information can be forwarded to the proper authorities for a more focused and timely emergency response, increasing the resilience of the urban population and their community.

     

In the name of Development: Power,profit and the datafication of the global South

We examine the current ‘datafication’ process underway in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and the power shifts it is creating in the field of international development. The use of new communications and database technologies in LMICs is generating ‘big data’ (for example from the use of mobile phones, mobile-based financial services and the internet) which is collected and processed by corporations. When shared, these data are also becoming a potentially valuable resource for development research and policy. With these new sources of data, new power structures are emerging within the field of development. We identify two trends in particular, illustrating them with examples: first, the empowerment of public–private partnerships around datafication in LMICs and the consequently growing agency of corporations as development actors. Second, the way commercially generated big data is becoming the foundation for country-level ‘data doubles’, i.e. digital representations of social phenomena and/or territories that are created in parallel with, and sometimes in lieu of, national data and statistics. We explore the resulting shift from legibility (Scott, 1998) to visibility, and the implications of seeing development interventions as a byproduct of larger-scale processes of informational capitalism.     

Canadian Inuit,digital Qanuqtuurunnarniq,and emerging geographic imaginations

Using the Canadian Arctic as a case study this paper explores how Internet-based research can be used to advance area studies in an era of rapid global change. Regions of the world are rapidly changing due to social, technological, and environmental processes, and traditionally marginalized groups are increasingly using digital tools to help shape new geographical imaginations of these regions. Digital research is uniquely capable of analyzing these political uses of digital technologies, to produce a better understanding of how many different stakeholders are shaping emerging geographical imaginations. The Canadian Arctic offers a particularly powerful case study to understand these processes both because it represents a geographic region that is complex, multi-scalar, and rapidly evolving, and also because it is a region in which traditionally marginalized indigenous groups are using the Internet to increase the visibility of their perspectives. This paper develops an innovative methodology, combining computational analysis of ‘big data’ along with traditional forms of qualitative analysis, to analyze representations of the Arctic across the websites of five different organizations. These organizational websites were chosen because each of the organizations has a different relationship to the Arctic, operates at a different geographic scale, has some relevance to areas of the Canadian Arctic in which Inuit live, and has a large website. The analysis successfully reveals how these different organizations use the web to shape different types of geographic imaginations of the Arctic, as well as the types of discursive politics being used by the organizations to push forward their own political goals. The result is a powerful form of area studies capable of highlighting the geographic imaginations and re-imaginations of a complex set of actors operating at many different scales.     

基于微博平台的中国城市网络信息不对称关系研究

网络信息空间的空间关系及信息流研究为信息化影响下的地理空间演变研究奠定基础。借助微博这一新兴网络信息传播平台获取中国城市间网络信息联系数据,采用流分析方法呈现城市间网络信息联系的空间格局。研究发现:中国城市网络信息关系呈现出"一超多强"的空间极化不对称格局。网络空间不对称格局与地理距离、经济社会发展水平存在密切关联性,表现为:城市对外网络信息总不对称度与其经济社会发展水平的相对一致性;经济社会发展差距对城市间网络信息不对称程度影响的距离衰减性;城市间网络信息不对称程度与经济社会发展差距的相对一致性;东、中、西部三大地区间网络信息不对称关系与经济发展梯度的相对一致性。     

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.     

Long-term biological data sets: Their role in research,monitoring, and management of estuarine and coastal marine systems

Long-term records of biological data are extremely valuable for documenting ecosystem changes, for differentiating natural changes from those caused by humans, and for generating and analyzing testable hypotheses. Long-term sampling, however, is generally discouraged by a variety of institutional disincentives, so that today such records are uncommon. We discuss approaches for overcoming these disincentives through improved research planning and design, including clearera priori definition of management and regulatory actions and information needs, more rigorous adherence to hypothesis formulation and testing, and proper spatial and temporal scaling in sampling. We distinguish between prospective study design, in which the foregoing elements are essential for coast-effectiveness, and retrospective analysis, which relies on reconstruction of long-term records from existing data sets. We demonstrate the great value of retrospective analysis of encountered data, and argue for renewed attention to archival of data sets with documented data quality, interacalibration and documentation of methodologies, and long-term storage of samples for future analysis. Such practices are essential to ensure the quality of long-term records that are reconstructed for retrospective examination of new hypotheses in the future.     

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.     

1:25万赤布张错幅区域地质图空间数据库建设方法与意义

1:25万赤布张错幅区域地质图空间数据库建设是依据<数字地质图空间数据库标准>,将传统填图方法完成的1:25万区调图幅在当前空间数据库模型的典型代表地理数据库模型上建立的.该模型以研究实体为对象,把对象分为基本要素类、综合要素类和对象类,通过组成地质图基本要素类和对象类出发,处理和把握存储与组织的关系,采用关联、依赖、组合和继承来描述对象之间的关系规则来构成新的关联集合的技术,增强了数据库服务能力.     

大数据环境下数字填图数据集成服务技术

应用数字填图技术形成了大量地质填图图幅数据,这些数据空间结构化和非结构化特征并存,如何在网络环境下提供高效的数据服务是急需解决的一个难题。大数据技术的发展为数字填图、数据集成服务提供了一种新的途径。通过对数字填图数据特征的分析,在研究地质调查信息网格大数据处理框架的基础上,提出了结构化和非结构化数据相结合的有序化组织管理、发布与服务方法,并对关键技术进行了研究与试验,取得了良好的效果。