The spatial knowledge politics of crisis mapping for community development

Crisis mapping, the combination of software-as-a-service mapping and reporting aimed at large numbers of individuals, is proposed for chronic problems as well as acute issues; it is universalized for global south disasters as well as global north community development. It supposedly affords a new spatial knowledge politics (SKP) that unfolds in local communities. We tested the role of spatial knowledge politics in crisis mapping for community development by co-developing, with local organizations, four applications based on the prominent mapping-telecommunications crisis platform, Crowdmap by Ushahidi. We assessed crisis mapping’s effectiveness in North American community based activities in Francophone and Anglophone Canada. We found persistent technical challenges, consistent with the literature, although crisis mapping allowed increased opportunities for the developer to insert their knowledge. Analysis of the contributions illustrated the use of crisis mapping to report on place-based features that enabled contributors to connect, but also limited the ability to express location and place in 160 characters. It revealed tensions in conceptualization of local spatial knowledge politics as witness versus political influence. Crisis mapping could simultaneously aid and disrupt traditional place-based politics of community based organizations. Our critique serves as a test of crisis mapping’s universality for other fields and its promise of a new SKP.     

遥感技术及在城市国土规划中的应用

遥感技术是获取城市空间信息的现代化手段。遥感测绘技术在大比例尺数字化制图、辅助城市规划设计、专题信息调查等方面,可为城市规划和国土资源管理提供重要支持。     

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.     

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.     

Recent progress on geologic time ontologies and considerations for future works

Semantic Web technologies bring innovative ideas to computer applications in geoscience. As an essential part of the Semantic Web, ontologies are increasingly discussed in the geoscience community, in which geologic time scale is one of the topics that have received the most discussion and practices. This paper aims to carry out a review of the recent progress on geologic time ontologies, discuss further improvements, and make recommendations for other geoscience ontology works. Several models and ontologies of geologic time scale are collected and analyzed. Items such as ontology evaluation, ontology mapping, ontology governance, ontology delivery and multilingual labels are discussed for advancing the geologic time ontologies. We hope the discussion can be useful for other geoscience ontology works, and we also make a few further recommendations, such as referring to an ontology spectrum in ontology creation, collaborative working to improve interoperability, and balancing expressivity, implementability and maintainability to achieve better applications of ontologies.     

Using web demographics to model population change of Vietnamese-Americans in Texas between 2000 and 2009

With respect to the great wealth of information available online, the Internet can be viewed as a gigantic database with diverse resources. One of the pressing issues is to investigate the effectiveness and usefulness of the available information over the Internet. This research modeled the population change of Vietnamese-Americans (VA) in Texas from 2000 to 2009 by obtaining web demographic data from the Internet. The project objective is to pilot study a novel approach to conducting online “census” by using Web 2.0 technologies and to investigate the effectiveness of web data for GIS-based demographic application. The solicited VA demographics were geocoded at both county and census tract levels and compared with the Census 2000 demographics in the Geographic Information Systems. Spatial and statistical analyses were used to explore the spatial distribution of VA and to model their population change between 2000 and 2009. The findings of this study include: (1) in general, there are significant differences in the spatial distribution of the VA population between the web demographics and Census 2000 at both county and census tract levels, (2) the Hoover Indices of VA population in Texas at 2000 and 2009 revealed a trend of deconcentration which conforms to the general rural-urban-suburban migration among major metropolitan areas in Texas. This study sheds new insights to using web demographic data for population predictions and applications to plan services for ethnic groups.     

以科学发展观统领测绘工作初探

为贯彻落实科学发展观对测绘工作的要求,应以科学发展观统领国土资源测绘工作全局,充分利用测绘成果以及现代测绘技术,为推进科学发展提供保障服务。     

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.     

用信息通讯网络平台构筑灌溉管理新模式

随着信息化、网络化的进程不断加快,信息通信技术迅速普及,其对经济社会发展形成了具大的推动力,通信网络已成为经济发展的一种战略性资源和高科技手段,利用信息产业新技术、新业务、新成果和新服务做为灌溉管理工作的一个新平台,形成一个网络型、管理型、服务型的灌溉管理新体制,在灌溉管理上可拓宽管理服务区域,加快灌溉信息的传速和反馈,达到与农户的互动,加强灌溉情况的勾通。使灌溉管理单位和农户之间的沟通和联系越来越紧密。可以促进灌溉管理流程更加简便高效,提高灌溉管理效率,减少管理工作中间环节,降低灌溉管理成本,全面提高灌溉管理服务质量。利用通讯信息网络平台来组建灌溉管理组织,通过在灌区的试运行,管理单位与农户联系迅速,灌溉及时,费用降低,作用显著,应运效果好。信息化、网络化与水利灌溉管理工作的融合。对灌溉管理乃至水利工作的全面发展将具有深远的影响,     

The MED-SUV virtual research environment for enabling the GEO Geohazard supersites in Italy

This paper presents the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) enabling two European GEO Geohazard Supersites in Italy. According to GEO (Group on Earth Observation) vision, Geohazard Supersites provide access to spaceborne and in-situ geophysical data and models for selected sites prone to natural hazards –noticeably, earthquakes and volcano eruptions. The VRE was implemented in the framework of the Mediterranean Supersite Volcanoes (MED-SUV) project, funded by the European Commission. MED-SUV realized one of the European supersite demonstrators covering the two Permanent Supersites selected in Italy: Mt. Etna and Campi Flegrei/Vesuvius. The MED-SUV VRE provides advanced services for heterogeneous data and information management and sharing. MED-SUV started identifying the main supersite requirements including: the interoperability with existing data/information supply systems, the support of policy-based access control, the access to processing capabilities provided by external platforms, the management resources for publishing and sharing new products, the integration with significant global systems such as GEOSS and EPOS. MED-SUV adopted a System of Systems (SoS) approach to address interoperability with the identified heterogeneous systems supplying data and information. The SoS approach is based on a brokering architecture, where a specialized component (i.e the MED-SUV Broker: MSB) connects the existing and next-coming data sources leaving them autonomous. MSB carries out all the necessary mediation and harmonization tasks exposing standard interfaces enabling the interconnection with external systems like GEOSS and EPOS. In addition, MSB is accessible via a JavaScript library implementing Web APIs to facilitate the development of Web and mobile applications.     

A trust and reputation model for filtering and classifying knowledge about urban growth

In this paper we present a trust and reputation model to classify and filter collaboratively contributed geographic information. We hypothesize that users contribute information in a collaborative system akin to Web 2.0 collaborative applications. We build on previous work where trust is proposed as a proxy for information quality and propose a spatial trust model to filter and extract high quality information about urban growth behaviors contributed by users. The motivating scenario involves residents of recently urbanized areas taking into account their interactions with their surroundings. The main contribution of this paper is a formal trust and reputation model that takes into account the spatial context of users and their contributions.     

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.     

MOIMS在WebGIS中的应用

本文简要介绍了GIS和WebGIS的基本概念,概述了WebGIS实现的几种方案及各自特点,并结合"地应力和地质灾害网上数据库查询系统"专题分析了ESRI的MapObjects 2.0(简称MO)和Internet Map Server for MapObjects 2.0(简称MOIMS)的功能、组成和工作原理,探讨了如何用MOIMS技术建立WebGIS发布平台。      

地矿实验室信息管理系统Geo-LIMS 2.0

对中国地质调查局武汉地质调查中心实验测试室开发的地矿实验室信息管理系统Geo-LIMS 2.0的功能、特点及应用进行了较详细的介绍。从地矿实验室实际工作出发,将信息技术与实验室现有质量保证体系相结合,Geo-LIMS 2.0系统实现了实验室从样品登录、任务分配、作业生成、数据记录与计算、数据汇总、质量监控,到分析报告生成的全流程信息的计算机自动处理,基本涵盖了地矿实验室管理工作的主要方面,精简和优化了实验室的运作环节和业务流程,有利于管理人员和分析人员更加专注于测试方法核心技术开发,大大提高了工作效率和工作质量。该系统数据输入量小,操作简单,数据查询、统计功能强大,具备完善的权限管理功能。系统维护简单快速,能够满足地矿实验室管理工作。     

Gender and the GeoWeb: divisions in the production of user-generated cartographic information

The GeoWeb presents an opportunity to expand the array of potential contributors describing the earth through digital geographic information. However, the adoption of user-generated geographic information has not been uniform, resulting in an uneven distribution of content and more nuanced digital divides. This paper uses a survey of Internet users to measure the gender divide in the contributions of cartographic information to the Internet and examine the impact of this divide within the context of OpenStreetMap and Google MapMaker. This paper argues that in both publicly available basemaps the gender divide results in men serving as the gatekeepers of local knowledge leading to gendered user-generated representations. As these digital basemaps are reproduced and utilized by almost every mobile application or web-based map, the gender divisions in the creators and content are endlessly reproduced.     

LUNARINFO: A Data Archiving and Retrieving System for the Circumlunar Explorer Based on XML/Web Services

It is essential to build a modern information management system to store and manage data of our circumlunar explorer in order to realize the scientific objectives. It is difficult for an information system based on traditional distributed technology to communicate information and work together among heterogeneous systems in order to meet the new requirement of Internet development. XML and Web Services, because of their open standards and self-containing properties, have changed the mode of information organization and data management. Now they can provide a good solution for building an open, extendable, and compatible information management system, and facilitate interchanging and transferring of data among heterogeneous systems. On the basis of the three-tiered browse/server architectures and the Oracle 9i Database as an information storage platform, we have designed and implemented a data archiving and retrieval system for the circumlunar explorer-LUNARINFO. We have also     

MAPSUV数字测图成果3D模拟系统的设计

数字测图系统在城市地理信息系统建设中有着广泛的应用.根据MAPSUV生成的SUV文件数据, 基于二维电子地图的平面位置, 通过虚拟现实技术, 直接将测量得到的地物空间、属性信息直观清晰地显示成三维虚拟地图, 从而实现测图成果的表现方式由二维到三维的转变.对数字测图成果三维模拟系统的设计原则整体结构、数据组织、系统功能做了详细的探讨.介绍了系统数据源、数据处理、模型库和纹理库建立以及三维可视化成果图的显示和输出.该系统集成了GIS、VRML、测绘等理论和技术, 具有数据建模, 场景漫游、属性查询等功能, 再现了二维数字地图的三维景观.测图成果3D模拟系统建模周期短, 工作量小, 可应用于城市规划、测绘、交通等许多领域.      

Network geoinformation technology for seismic hazard research

In this paper, we present two network geoinformation technologies. Their common major features are (1) network access to geographical information, which may be distributed over network servers or reside on the user PC, (2) modern methods of knowledge acquisition from spatial and spatio-temporal data and (3) high interactivity and clarity of visualization boosting the decision-making efficiency. The technologies are incorporated into web-GIS GeoProcessor 2.0 and GeoTime 2.0. By means of analyzing several case studies, we argue that the proposed applications are effective tools for seismic hazard research.     

城市地下管线信息系统的开发与应用

本文在分析城市地下管线信息系统发展现状的基础上,提出了一种新的管线信息系统开发模式,即成图系统加属性信息管理系统加图数连动机制。