Renee Sieber

Public Participation Geographic Information Systems: A Literature Review and Framework

Abstract Public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) pertains to the use of geographic information systems (GIS) to broaden public involvement in policymaking as well as to the value of GIS to promote the goals of nongovernmental organizations, grassroots groups, and community-based organizations. The article first traces the social history of PPGIS. It then argues that PPGIS has been socially constructed by a broad set of actors in research across disciplines and in practice across sectors. This produced and reproduced concept is then explicated through four major themes found across the breadth of the PPGIS literature: place and people, technology and data, process, and outcome and evaluation. The themes constitute a framework for evaluating current PPGIS activities and a roadmap for future PPGIS research and practice.

Conforming (to) the opposition: the social construction of geographical information systems in social movements

This paper proposes a new framework to understand the use and value of GIS by social movement groups and to transcend the contested debate over how and whether GIS should be adopted. It frames the debate in terms of the conforming properties of GIS. The proposal is that conservation GROs must conform to GIS to ensure effective usage; however, in the process of that use, they mould the GIS to their own objectives. Various examples from the North American conservation movement illustrate the properties of GIS conformity and likely outcomes of research. This paper asks the reader to rethink PPGIS and GIS diffusion. It also poses questions for further research that frames adoption as an issue of conformity.

Civic open data at a crossroads: Dominant models and current challenges

Abstract As open data becomes more widely provided by government, it is important to ask questions about the future possibilities and forms that government open data may take. We present four models of open data as they relate to changing relations between citizens and government. These models include; a status quo ‘data over the wall’ form of government data publishing, a form of ‘code exchange’, with government acting as an open data activist, open data as a civic issue tracker, and participatory open data. These models represent multiple end points that can be currently viewed from the unfolding landscape of government open data. We position open data at a crossroads, with significant concerns of the conflicting motivations driving open data, the shifting role of government as a service provider, and the fragile nature of open data within the government space. We emphasize that the future of open data will be driven by the negotiation of the ethical-economic tension that exists between provisioning governments, citizens, and private sector data users.

Situating the Adoption of VGI by Government

Governments have long been active online, providing services and information to citizens. With the development of Web 2.0 technology, many governments are considering how they can better engage with and accept citizen input online, particularly through the gathering and use of volunteered geographic information (VGI). Though there are several benefits to governments accepting VGI, the process of adopting VGI as a support to decision-making is not without challenge. We identify three areas of challenge to the adoption of VGI by government; these are the costs of VGI, the challenges for governments to accept non-expert data of questionable accuracy and formality, and the jurisdictional issues in VGI. We then identify three ways that governments can situate themselves to accept VGI—by formalizing the VGI collection process, through encouraging collaboration between levels of government, and by investigating the participatory potential of VGI.

Geospatial Agents, Agents Everywhere . . .

The use of the related terms “agent-based”, “multi-agent”, “software agent” and “intelligent agent” have witnessed significant growth in the Geographic Information Science (GIScience) literature in the past decade. These terms usually refer to both artificial life agents that simulate human and animal behavior and software agents that support human-computer interactions. In this article we first comprehensively review both types of agents. Then we argue that both these categories of agents borrow from Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, requiring them to share the characteristics of and be similar to AI agents. We also argue that geospatial agents form a distinct category of AI agents because they are explicit about geography and geographic data models. Our overall goal is to first capture the diversity of, and then define and categorize GIScience agent research into geospatial agents, thereby capturing the diversity of agent-oriented architectures and applications that have been developed in the recent past to present a holistic review of geospatial agents.

Automated web harvesting to collect and analyse user-generated content for tourism

Reviews of tourism amenities posted online by tourists represent an emerging source of data to support tourism research. To obtain this user-generated content (UGC), either a time-consuming manual transcription or the use of automated web harvesting – a controversial practice – is required. This paper describes the use of automated web harvesting to extract review data on the Canadian province of Nova Scotia from a major travel review website. We present a summary of the reviews by type, spatial distribution, and star rating. We then discuss the benefits of and challenges to the collection and use of UGC. We conclude with four potential approaches for tourism researchers interested in obtaining access to UGC.

Doing Public Participation on the Geospatial Web

The emergence of Web 2.0, open source software tools, and geosocial networks, along with associated mobile devices and available government data, is widely considered to have altered the nature and processes of place-based digital participation. Considerable theorizing has been dedicated to the geographic version of Web 2.0, the geospatial Web (Geoweb). To assess the theories, we draw on four years of empirical work across Canada that considers the nature of public participation on the Geoweb. We are driven by the question of how easy or difficult it is to “do” Geoweb-enabled participation, particularly participation as envisioned by researchers such as Arnstein and planning practitioners. We consider how the Geoweb could transform methods by which citizens and nonprofit organizations communicate with the state on environmental issues that affect their lives. We conduct a meta-analysis of twelve research cases and derive new findings that reach across the cases on how the Geoweb obliges us to redefine and unitize participation. This redefinition reifies existing digital inequalities, blurs distinctions between experts and nonexperts, heterogenizes the state as an actor in the participation process, reassigns participation activities in a participation hierarchy, and distances participation from channels of influence.

Spatial cyberinfrastructures, ontologies, and the humanities

We report on research into building a cyberinfrastructure for Chinese biographical and geographic data. Our cyberinfrastructure contains (i) the McGill-Harvard-Yenching Library Ming Qing Womens Writings database (MQWW), the only online database on historical Chinese womens writings, (ii) the China Biographical Database, the authority for Chinese historical people, and (iii) the China Historical Geographical Information System, one of the first historical geographic information systems. Key to this integration is that linked databases retain separate identities as bases of knowledge, while they possess sufficient semantic interoperability to allow for multidatabase concepts and to support cross-database queries on an ad hoc basis. Computational ontologies create underlying semantics for database access. This paper focuses on the spatial component in a humanities cyberinfrastructure, which includes issues of conflicting data, heterogeneous data models, disambiguation, and geographic scale. First, we describe the methodology for integrating the databases. Then we detail the system architecture, which includes a tier of ontologies and schema. We describe the user interface and applications that allow for cross-database queries. For instance, users should be able to analyze the data, examine hypotheses on spatial and temporal relationships, and generate historical maps with datasets from MQWW for research, teaching, and publication on Chinese women writers, their familial relations, publishing venues, and the literary and social communities. Last, we discuss the social side of cyberinfrastructure development, as people are considered to be as critical as the technical components for its success.

Tourism and environmental change in Barbados: gathering citizen perspectives with volunteered geographic information (VGI)

New map-based online tools have the potential to facilitate citizen participation in discussing the impacts of tourism. This research investigates the use of Geospatial Web 2.0 (Geoweb) tools to gather volunteered geographic information (VGI) on tourism-related environmental change from citizens of Barbados. We hosted participatory mapping workshops where groups of Barbadians directly contributed content to a series of online maps. These maps were made with the free Google My Map tool, allowing users to interact with detailed satellite imagery of Barbados. Qualitative observations were added and geo-referenced to these maps identifying several types of environmental change concerns, both those generated by tourism, and those with implications for tourism development. We analysed how participants used Google My Maps, identifying concerns of accuracy, data completeness and digital/computer literacy amongst users that could affect further use of this tool. Overall, the Geoweb approach provided participants with a unique perspective on environmental change that facilitated deeper discussion of issues and produced a publicly available, spatially referenced record of citizen concerns. Further research needs are demonstrated, including user interface design, accuracy and uncertainty, and how to manage varying levels of digital literacy.

An individual-based approach to modeling tourism dynamics.

To better understand the dynamics of tourism, emphasis in modeling is evolving from descriptive towards analytic, process-based approaches. We present a conceptual framework of tourism as a set of individual-based interactions between tourists and destinations occurring on a spatial, scaled landscape. We use agent-based modeling (ABM), a type of computer simulation, to operationalize this individual-based framework of tourism development and change, set in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. The model is used to generate a series of scenarios about the impact of visitation to rural destinations through modifying individual awareness and tourist mobility variables. The findings generated with this ABM demonstrate that the spatial location of a destination in relation to a network of other destinations has implications for how that destination can capitalize on changes to tourist destination awareness and mobility. The impact of spatial location is only apparent as a result of modeling the individual interactions of tourists and destinations. This research proposes that an individual-based approach can be used to better understand the spatial, multiscaled processes and dynamics that generate emergent patterns of impact.