Invigorating GIScience

Michael F. Goodchild

University of California

Santa Barbara

GIScience research• The UCGIS role and niche

– the cutting edge

GISRUK 2012: The older and newer• Terrain visibility• Geospatial distribution

and forecasting• Spatial ecology• Landscape visibility and

visualization• Remote sensing• Social and historic• Urban GIS

• LiDAR• Mining social media• Qualitative GIS• Location-based services• Environmental geoinformatics• Open GIS• 3D, indoor GIS• Space-time GIS• The semantic Web• Geodesign• Crowdsourcing

Québec 2012: The older and newer• Sharing data and tools• Spatially enabling society• Privacy, legal liability, and

ethics• Education and training• Remote sensing• Spatial data infrastructure

• Volunteered geographic information

• Semantics• Cognition• LiDAR• Spatiotemporal data mining• The GeoWeb• Participatory planning• 3D, indoor GIS• The Cloud and the Grid• Geodesign• Spatial thinking

Looking forward• “what’s past is prologue”

– what’s already happened merely sets the stage for what is to come

• GIScience 2.0– much more dynamic– much more bottom-up

Engaging the community• VGI, neogeography

– the citizen as producer as well as consumer– maps personalized, transitory

• How is this changing the geospatial world?– an alternative to traditional production– challenging old assumptions about SDI

• Now that citizens are empowered to map– what will they choose to map?

• new features, new data types, new layers

Geographic information as a social construction

• Brian Harley The New Nature of Maps 2001• The modernist view:

– what is it called?• 909 West Campus Lane

– what type of feature is it?• house

– where is it?• 34 deg 24 min 42.7 sec North, 119 deg 52 min 14.4 sec

West

• What’s the post-modernist view?

Mark and Turk, Progress on Yindjibarndi ethnophysiography, COSIT 2007

Two examples of Wundu

Two examples of Garga

Names as social constructions• What is it called?

– The English Channel– La Manche

• Who calls it that?– Whose national mapping agency made the map?

• What type of feature is it?– In whose system of types?

• Where is it?

schema.org• “Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have decided

to propose a common markup vocabulary, Schema.org, based on the Microdata format, simplifying the job of webmasters who want to give meaning to their web pages’ content.”

(June 2011)

Thing>Place>SportsActivityLocation• BowlingAlley• ExerciseGym• GolfCourse• HealthClub• PublicSwimmingPool• SkiResort• SportsClub• StadiumOrArena• TennisComplex

Flickr photographs tagged “Eiffel Tower” (Linna Li)

Space and place• Place-based GIS

– linked by place not space– by name not coordinates– schematic sketch maps not planimetric control– many GIS functions impossible

• but many new ones possible

– a new perspective on positional accuracy

• Why?– because humans think about, reason with, and

like to descibe places rather than coordinates

• Platial technology as parallel to spatial

Research challenges• How to create schematics

– for display in small devices

• How to personalize– dynamic, user-centered– varying criteria

• what are those criteria?

• How to conflate planimetric and schematic• The functionality of a platial technology

– a geospatial variant of linked data?

The VGI quality problem• No quality control, no metadata, no

standards– none of the guarantees of authoritative data– no prospect of conventional analysis

• What can we do to assure quality?• Three solutions

The crowd solution• Linus’s Law

– the more eyes to review, the more accurate– works for popular facts

• Geographic facts may be obscure– little-known areas of the world

• or not so obscure

The social solution• Who can be trusted?• A hierarchy of moderators and gate-keepers

– all volunteered facts referred up the hierarchy

• A social structure– promotion based on track record– heavy, accurate contributors promoted– e.g., Wikipedia, OSM– top levels of Google MapMaker reserved for

Google staff

The geographic solution• How can we know if a purported geographic

fact is false?– because it violates the rules by which the

geographic world is constructed– the syntactic rules– compare language rules, the sentence structure

of English

• What are those rules?– essential, fundamental geographic knowledge

www.flickr.com

Analysis by Linna Li

bergonia.org

Formalizing geographic knowledge• To enable automated triage of asserted facts• To enable automated synthesis

– into products that more closely resemble the traditional ones

Synthesis as the new analysis?• How to assemble disparate data

– into a form analogous to the traditional authoritative map?• or the traditional statistical database?

• From text, images, spatial data• With metadata, provenance• How to analyze such data?

The general problem• Consider an atom of unary geographic

information <x,z>• All such atoms are incomplete

– measurement error in coordinates– classification uncertainty

• “this location is oak savanna”

– attribute error• misnamed street

• Synthesis attempts to resolve incompleteness– and to integrate atoms into polygons, polylines

Where am I? (missing x)

UNO geologist: Video tells bin Laden's hiding place

Omaha World-Herald Posted on Tuesday, October 16, 2001

“The image of Osama bin Laden that flickered on Jack Shroder's TV was grainy and brief, but it was all he needed. Jack Shroder, a University of Nebraska at Omaha geologist who has done research in Afghanistan, says a videotape of Osama bin Laden gives important clues to where he might be hiding…he is certain that the type of sedimentary rock visible in the videotape is found only in Paktia and Paktika, two provinces in southeastern Afghanistan about 125 miles from Kabul.”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/549291/posts

And the next 20 years?• The stream of new ideas will continue

– as new technologies arrive• We may not know it as GIScience or geomatics

– location may become a transparent part of systems

• Spatial will remain special– spatial dependence, spatial heterogeneity, scale,

uncertainty, privacy, etc.• Improvements in the technology will allow us to focus

more on:– the underlying concepts– the real world that GIS represents

A prescription for UCGIS• This field is now huge

– UCGIS needs to define its specific niche• and collaborate with emerging organizations

• Focus on cutting-edge research– organize seminars and workshops on the hottest

topics• physical and virtual• restrict entry to member organizations

• Abandon the concept of a research agenda– unless it can be redone at least every year– similarly treat the curriculum as fast-changing