Our workshop proposal for the 19th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science 2016 in Helsinki has been accepted.
Save the date: June 14th 2016 in Helsinki Finland.
The number of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and social media platforms is continuously growing, providing massive datasets of georeferenced content that is either actively contributed (e.g. adding data to OSM, Mapillary, or Flickr) or collected through more passive modes (e.g. enabling geolocation in Twitter feeds). Whereas contribution behavior for individual crowd sourcing applications has already been extensively analyzed in the literature, it is less understood if and how users participate in several crowd sourcing activities. Hence several research questions relevant to a better understanding of community involvement in data contributions evolve. These include for example, whether activity spaces in different sources are spatially co-located or spatially distinct for individual contributors, whether new VGI platforms attract new contributors not previously actively contributing, whether novel categories of contributors or contribution patterns emerge from user participation in various platforms, whether data from one VGI application platform is integrated into another, how the availability of multiple platforms affects spatial data quality, and whether contributor communities evolve across platforms. As an example, users started to cross-link data from different platforms, e.g. by mapping OSM point of interests (POIs) and street features (e.g. street lamps, sidewalk information) based on Mapillary photographs, or by tagging Flickr pictures with OSM tags to facilitate automatic extraction of descriptive information for Flickr images.
This workshop provides an opportunity for interested researchers to share ideas and findings on cross-platform data contributions and innovative analysis approaches, to demonstrate real-world applications using cross-linked data, and to discuss technical questions and innovations on data access. One portion in the workshop is dedicated to a hands-on session. In this session, basics of spatial data access through selected APIs and the extraction of summary statistics of the results will be illustrated so that workshop attendees are given the opportunity to learn or refresh their data handling skills.
Proposed topics include:
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– Spatio-temporal analysis of activity patterns for individual users across multiple VGI and/or social media platforms
– Identification of contribution profiles based on activities across multiple platforms
Formation of cross-platform contribution communities
– Change of user population and contribution patterns through novel VGI and social media platforms
– Analysis of cross-linked data and cross-link editing methods in VGI and social media platforms and its applications
– Recent developments in APIs for spatial data access from VGI and social media platforms
Objective
The overarching objective of this workshop is to encourage discussion of user contribution patterns and data sharing across multiple VGI and social media platforms, and to learn how to access and visualize data from various platforms. This includes the following detailed objectives to:
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– Exchange research findings on cross-platform user contribution patterns
– Understand differences in spatial/temporal coverage of contributions to different platforms
– Learn if and how data are linked across different VGI/social media platforms, what kind of communities evolve, and how cross-linked data are used in real-world applications
– Discuss the effect of the continuously increasing number of VGI and social media platforms on spatial data quality and user behavior
– Identify current research questions and an emerging research agenda
– Learn how to access and map spatial data through selected VGI and/or social media APIs (e.g. Mapillary, Instagram) and Web services in a hands-on session
– Assess the quality of VGI
Organization
Leading AGILE member and contact:
• University of Heidelberg, Germany (Alexander Zipf)
Contributing AGILE members:
• Maynooth University, Ireland (Peter Mooney)
Contributing non-AGILE members:
• University of Florida, United States (Hartwig H. Hochmair)
Organizing Committee:
• Jamal Jokar Arsanjani, Adam Rousell (University of Heidelberg)
• Levente Juhász (University of Florida)
Further information will be published online later.