Rob Feick

Community-based production of geographic information using open source software and Web 2.0

This article presents an innovative approach to citizen-led production of Web-based geographic information where new and/or existing digital map features are linked to annotations or commentary and citizens engage in synchronous and/or asynchronous discussion. The article discusses the relationship of the approach to public participation geographic information systems (PPGISs) and the emerging challenges associated with volunteered geographic information. A custom-developed, open source software tool named MapChat is used to facilitate the citizen inputs and discussions. The information generated from applying the approach through a series of community workshops is presented and discussed in light of current issues in PPGIS and volunteered geographic information research.

Understanding the Value of VGI

Growing investments of time, money and other resources in the production of geographic information (GI) in concert with the increasingly widespread use of GI throughout society are often accompanied by statements that reference the economic, cultural and social value of GI. Despite considerable effort over the past decade, our capacity to quantify the value of GI or even understand how value should be conceptualized remains limited. The recent emergence of volunteered geographic information (VGI) has introduced several new facets to the challenge of understanding the value of (V)GI. This chapter examines how VGI use and production are challenging our understanding of how GI and VGI alike are valued. Following a review of the traditional approaches to valuing GI, the chapter explores the distinctive characteristics of VGI use and production that introduce new dimensions to value. More specifically, the chapter proposes several metaphors (serendipitous and unexpected discovery, Debord’s ‘Derives’ metaphor, Lego block theory) that can be used to conceptualize VGI value and the potential to adapt the ‘fitness-for-use’ concept to guide user assessments of VGI value in practice.

A Multi-Scale Approach to Exploring Urban Places in Geotagged Photographs

User-generated content (UGC) that contains spatial references, often referred to by the more bounded concept of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), is often touted as a potentially revolutionary data source for geographical research. This paper explores the capacity of one increasingly prevalent source of these data, geographically encoded photographs, to capture spatial expressions of place in an urban environment. Geotagged photographs were obtained from the Flickr API to build a geographic database of photographs for the city of Vancouver, Canada from 2001-2012. These data were aggregated to multiple geographic units represented as hexagonal lattices. Spatial patterns of photo aggregation were examined for tessellations that ranged from 0.25 ha to 1024 ha. Tags associated with each photo were also explored through the notion of ‘tag-space’ at multiple resolutions, or “scales”, of analysis through local log-odds ratios. Results indicate a significant interaction between tag-space semantics and spatial aggregation which suggests that consideration of scale effects should be integral to analysis of this type of tagged VGI for exploring citizens’ sensing of urban environments. The results indicate further that we may have to reconsider the interaction between encoded meaning, the methods used for extracting such meaning from tag-space, and exogenous and endogenous spatial scales of spatial UGC.

BALANCING CONSENSUS AND CONFLICT WITH A GIS-BASED MULTI-PARTICIPANT, MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION SUPPORT TOOL

Many land use decision problems are sufficiently complex, controversial and non-routine in nature that their resolution requires not only knowledge, expertise and data drawn from several distinct domains, but also debate of multiple and often conflicting viewpoints, objectives and solution strategies. Despite the promise of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology for examining a wide variety of land use issues, it has been criticised for its lack of decision support capabilities in this and other application areas (Hendriks and Vriens, 2000; Towers, 1997; Heywood et al., 1994). In particular, the capacity of commercial GIS to facilitate debate and achieve some measure of balance among different viewpoints has been identified as a major weakness. This capability is constrained by several factors in commercial software, foremost of which is an intrinsic single-user perspective that disregards the multi-interest character of the decision making process and the socially constructed nature of data and analytical methods (Pickles, 1999; Flowerdew, 1998; Jones et al., 1997; Goodchild, 1995).

The Application of a Spatial Decision Support System to Tourism-Based Land Management in Small Island States

Tourism planning decisions involve varying degrees of participation from multiple interests, some of which may differ substantially in their objectives, relative authority, and perception of key issues. This article focuses on applying Geographic Information System technology within a customized software design to allow multiple participants from various sectors to designate land parcels appropriate for tourism-related development or for a competing land use. The approach adopted allows the degree of consensus in land designations to be identified and visualized in map form. A small sample of participants with diverse interests in land use and tourism planning issues apply this tool to a sample tourism planning study in West Bay District of Grand Cayman, British West Indies. The findings of the sample application are discussed, with emphasis given to the contributions that this type of information system can offer policy makers concerned with contentious tourism-related planning and management decisions.

Collaborative GIS for spatial decision support and visualization.

Collaborative geographic information systems (GIS) are maturing into an important collection of tools, theories, and practices to directly support multi-stakeholder participation in the planning and management of geographically distributed resources. Collaborative GIS are situated in the broader disciplinary area of Group Spatial Decision Support Systems (GSDSS) and can be defined as an integration of spatially enabled theories, tools, and technologies for structuring human participation and articulating issues of concern in local and distributed spatial planning processes (Balram and Dragicevic, 2006). A typical system design will include a digital workspace for map-based analysis and visualization, multi-modal interfaces for participant interactions, and digital databases to provide baseline data and store new information. In addition, the Collaborative GIS is usually integrated in a supporting organizational and technical structure to ensure continuity especially if change detection is a desired outcome. Spatial decision support and visualization have been two key application areas for Collaborative GIS designs. In their capacity as enabling platforms for spatial decision support, Collaborative GIS have served a variety of roles such as integrating virtual team participants (MacEachren, 2001), structuring planning processes (Balram and Dragicevic, 2005; Jankowski and Nyerges, 2001), balancing consensus and conflicts (Feick and Hall, 2002), and facilitating local stakeholder participation in resource decision processes (Nyerges et al., 2006). As a means to aid visualization for co-located or dispersed individuals and groups, Collaborative GIS have been used mainly to communicate planning scenarios and outcomes (MacEachren et al., 2005).

Evaluating municipal visioning

Until about 15 years ago, the term ‘vision’ was used in planning almost exclusively to describe the innovative ideas that individuals such as L’Enfant, Howard, Wright and Le Corbusier proposed as idealised future city forms (Shipley, 2000). While that traditional idea of the visionary persists (Wells, 2002), over a decade ago the planning profession began to use the words vision and visioning in several new ways. For example, when individuals are described as ‘having vision’, it refers commonly to how leaders inspire others with their thoughts or viewpoints about desired futures. Planners also began to talk about ‘community visioning’, which purports to describe a new method of soliciting stakeholder input for the creation of collective plans (Shipley & Newkirk, 1999). There was virtually no mention of visioning in these contexts before 1990. However, by the middle of the decade articles concerning vision and visioning appeared often in planning journals worldwide. For instance, the April 1995 issue of the American Planning Association’s (APA’s) Planning had three items on visioning, while Britain’s Planning Week for the same date also included several articles related to visioning. Similarly, three of the eight feature articles in the September issue of Plan Canada involved vision. The growing acceptance of visioning in planning practice is illustrated well in the APA Annual Awards for planning. In 1989, one plan involving vision received honourable mention; however, since 1993 two or more vision-oriented plans have been recognised every year (Shipley & Newkirk, 1998; Enlow, 2003). Community visions have been described as pictures of the future and of a particular place (Regional Municipality of Waterloo, 1992). They are thought to be dynamic ways for people to express their goals, descriptions and images of their community far into the future (Klein et al., 1993). Visioning exercises have been used in hundreds of locales across Canada, the USA, the UK, Australia and Africa as part of the processes for developing official plans and plans related to more specific land uses and activities, such as parks and transportation (Newman, 1993; Neill, 1999; Weinberg, 1999). The effort to create a plan for the World Trade Center site after the September 11th terrorist attacks involved 257 workshops where about “19,000 ideas generated in sessions were logged into a

Predicting Forest Age Classes from High Spatial Resolution Remotely Sensed Imagery Using Voronoi Polygon Aggregation

Efficient identification of forest age is useful for forest management and ecological applications. Here we propose a user-assisted method for determining forest age using high spatial resolution remotely sensed imagery. This method requires individual trees to be extracted from imagery and represented as points. We use a local maximum filter to generate points that are converted to Voronoi polygons. Properties of the Voronoi polygons are correlated with forest age and used to aggregate points (trees) into areas (stands) based on three forest age classes. Accuracy of the aggregation ranges from approximately 68% to 78% and identification of the mature class is more consistent and accurate than the younger classes.

Bumps and bruises in the digital skins of cities: unevenly distributed user-generated content across US urban areas

ABSTRACT As momentum and interest build to leverage new forms of user-generated content that contains geographical information, classical issues of data quality remain significant research challenges. In this article we explore issues of representativeness for one form of user-generated content, geotagged photographs in US urban centers. Generalized linear models were developed to associate photograph distribution with underlying socioeconomic descriptors at the city-scale, and examine intra-city variation in relation to income inequality. We conclude our analyses with a detailed examination of Dallas, Seattle, and New Orleans. Our findings add to the growing volume of evidence outlining uneven representativeness in user-generated data, and our approach contributes to the stock of methods available to investigate geographic variations in representativeness. In addition to city-scale variables relating to distribution of user-generated content, variability remains at localized scales that demand an individual and contextual understanding of their form and nature. The findings demonstrate that careful analysis of representativeness at both macro and micro scales can simultaneously provide important insights into the processes giving rise to user-generated data sets and potentially shed light on their embedded biases and suitability as inputs to analysis.

A Practical Approach for Evaluating Cultural Heritage Landscapes: Lessons From Rural Ontario

Abstract The identification and conservation of cultural heritage landscapes (CHL) is becoming a standard part of planning practice. In Ontario, Canada, the provincial government issued a directive in 2005 to mandate protection of CHLs. Since that time, local and regional planners have been active, operationalizing CHL identification and developing appropriate land use regulations for their preservation. This article uses the study of a a rural landscape centred on the last surviving covered bridge in Ontario to illustrate how focus groups and web-based participation can be used to establish the significance of an area and to build recommendations for its designation and protection.