Archive for November, 2015

The Nuances of Open Data

Monday, November 2nd, 2015

In the 2015 article “The Impact of Open Data in the UK: Complex, Unpredictable, and Political” Ben Worthy convincingly demonstrates how Open Data should be seen as a complex, unpredictable and political issue. Before this article, I honestly thought that access to government data could only lead to better things. In hindsight, this seems startlingly naïve – yet I think that even more knowledgeable proponents of open data can appreciate the nuances presented in the article regardless of whether they can provide a counter-argument.

The article’s format intuitively answered my questions as they came up: what are the downsides of Open Data? Who are the users?  How does the media play a role? However, I think the point that hit me the most was that despite the fact that open data is portrayed to be neutral information; it can be used for very political purposes. Access to knowledge does have power, especially the power to manipulate information as you see fit. What I really get a sense of about Open data is how how tensions can be created between different levels or sections of government. I also thought one of the most interesting ideas that I would have liked to read more on was the section talking about how the relationship between accountability and transparency is very complex (796). I think this relationship could be easily expanded to another paper.

Finally, Worthy’s insights into ‘armchair auditors’ was very relevant to other topics of discussion in the class –specifically the fact that these people are not “ordinary” citizens but rather have a specialized repertoire of time, interest and skills (796). Overall, I think it is very difficult to get people to care that much about very specific issues unless it is part of their jobs or affects their lives in a direct and personal way. This has wider implications for other aspects of GIScience such as VGI.

-Vdev

Roche 2014: Issues with Democratization and Uncertainty

Monday, November 2nd, 2015

Smart cities must strike balance between maximizing efficiency for current conditions and leaving room for uncertainties in how needs will change in the future. In a way smart cities might be described as cities that rely more on digital infrastructure than physical infrastructure. The former would be easier and cheaper to modify with changing needs. As said in the article, innovation and technological literacy on the part of the city’s residence would be key factors. Relying instead on top-down design from a municipal government might impose too much uniformity, when the needs of the city’s residents are so diverse. While I’m usually skeptical of positivist notions that better technology will lead to more democratization, in the case of smart cities I find this idea more compelling. Crowd-sourcing and VGI do have an incredible potential to give city planners a comprehensive and dynamic view of the behavior and needs of urban residents. However, again the threat arises of the technology being diverted to serve the purposes of certain interests, bypassing the needs of the majority. Specifically, I think there is a danger of cities ending up developing to suit the needs of companies like Uber and Google. This would be especially probable if governments, with the best of intentions, started subsidizing such companies in the belief that the private sector will the most effective leader in developing smart cities. Finally, I find that this topic relates very pertinently to my seminar topic of uncertainty. I imagine that the technological, economic and environmental uncertainties with which we cope will probably only get bigger as time goes on. Smart cities will be increasingly difficult to conceive of as time passes.

– Yojo

UCDP GED and Open Data

Monday, November 2nd, 2015

The benefit of datasets is that they are a great tool for cross comparison of attributes and trends. Therefore, establishing a resource that compares and elucidates trends relating to organized violent conflict would be extremely beneficial for peace research and policy. However, the dataset will only be of significance as long as it applies specified standards for structuring the data that are both machine and human readable. In addition, datasets open to the public should focus on relational database models and devise a clear ontology for the data in order to optimize interoperability and information exchange. The UCDP GED is a good example of open data within the subfield of GIScience because it has had success cataloguing events that are difficult to observe and classify within the geospatial and temporal domains. Events of organized violence are difficult to observe due to their sporadic, socially complex, and seemingly irrational nature.

UCDP GED also highlights the importance of the subfield of geocoding within GIScience. Limitations and conflicts in geocoding events of organized violence for the UCDP GED are apparent in the divide between the ability to code rural locations of violence as opposed to urban locations. We notice a digital and informational divide between places that are poorer and less populated compared to places with greater population densities and more wealth. Alternative geocoding resources and databases therefore become of utmost importance for mapping and observing organized violent conflict in rural areas. Limitation of geospatial frameworks for rural areas also allude to approaches of uncertainty in spatial data. Therefore, what methods do we apply in order to compensate and aggregate for marginalized place that that lack geospatial frameworks and coding?

-geobloggerRB

The UCDP dataset: now with geography!

Monday, November 2nd, 2015

The article by Sundberg and Melander was an interesting article, which for me brought up questions about spatial scales and situating the data within geography and GIS. One thing I noticed immediately about the article was the map, as this is often what non-geographers immediately think of GIS and geography. I was disappointed that the authors didn’t map the trends of organized violence (i.e., state-based, non-state and one-sided), because it would have been a very interesting visualization to see, for example, where state-based violence is occurring the most. They have represented it temporally in a line graph, but it would have added to the analysis to represent it geographically. Perhaps they didn’t include it because it would have just reiterated already known information? (For example, it’s perhaps already well-known which countries or cities in Africa experience the most state-based violence.)

For me, the article raised as many questions about spatial scales as it did about open data. The authors write that previous research has been focused mainly on violence at the country/year level, but they argue for more sub-national studies, saying that they might help shed more light on the underlying mechanisms of violence. I agree, and think that mapping examples of violence at the sub-national level would allow for more thorough examination of all the variables that contribute to violence, because these variables would certainly change from country to country.

Overall, I found the article very interesting, but a bit difficult to situate the topic in GIScience or even in geography. It seemed like the authors were incorporating the spatial data as simply another facet of their data, along with other factors like time and type of violence, rather than framing it as an investigation fundamentally based in geography. For the authors, GIS is a tool they use to georeferenced their data and make a nice-looking map. This is a fine approach – but it leaves me wondering how the article would be different if the approach was embedded in geography, rather than incorporating geography as one aspect of the data.

~denasaur

Ben Worthy’s Impact of Open Data in the UK

Monday, November 2nd, 2015

Worthy’s article (2015) highlights the successes and issues that have arisen from U.K.’s Transparency Agenda. Although the U.K. coalition government is providing transparent open data about government spending, Worthy argues that “it is more complex, more unpredictable, and more political than the rhetoric around Open Data indicates” (788). After watching a promotional video regarding government open data (http://opengovernmentdata.org/), I agree with Worthy, the idea of government open data seems simple to develop and is for a good cause, but there are many details that need to be considered. For example, Worthy states that the Agenda’s aim to create “‘armchair auditors’” (i.e. citizens that can hold the government accountable for certain issues) and incorporate participatory “involvement” has rarely occurred, indicating that open data may not necessarily encourage participatory behavior. I believe this failure propagated because the relationships between the government and the citizens need to be transformed. Similar to how VGI has difficulty convincing people that amateur citizen data can be utilized for spatial information, governments have a hard time accepting citizens’ contributions. A lack of bilateral communication between the government and the citizens prevents humans-as-sensors who can provide useful spatial information for a variety of government applications. If implemented efficiently and successfully, bilateral communication can eventually cause governments to cut certain jobs to save money.** However, in the article’s case, little has occurred to encourage the U.K. citizens to provide their own feedback on the government’s open data and their own spatial information to the government, rather “‘neutral’ technology” has hidden the potential for a “neo-liberal view of state-society relations” (789).

Even if the U.K. government encouraged more citizens to provide feedback on their open data, citizen participation may not occur due to lack of interest or knowledge. Although Professor Sieber pointed out to me last class that some VGI scientists may not want citizens to know that their public/open spatial information is collected, I think it is important and ethical to inform citizens of their contributions and there should be approaches to encourage citizens to want to contribute spatial information for government purposes. For instance, if citizens can see that their contributions are valuable and needed for good reasons, then maybe more people will want to participate. Also, providing government spending is certainly transparent, but this type of open data may not be of interest to the common citizens. I honestly would take no interest in how governments personally spend their money, I rather see government data on social or economic phenomena within my residing city/province/country, like crime or poverty.

One last point, this article is a case study that is more relevant to Western democratic governments. Different types and levels of government across the world vary on the amount and type of open data released. Types of democracy in governments vary; for example: in China the government disallows their citizens from accessing Facebook or Google, thus preventing certain open data to be easily accessible to their citizens. Even within Western governments that usually have similar governmental infrastructures such as Canada and USA, there are various regulations on what governmental open data is released or not.

-MTM

** (Note: outsourcing responsibilities to the citizens to cut governmental jobs may not necessarily be ethically, but it could be an incentive to encourage governments to consider citizens’ amateur geospatial information.)

 

Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset

Monday, November 2nd, 2015

The article Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset by Sundberg and Melander (2013) is an overview of an open data database.  They explore the reasons for its creation as well as associated definitions and limitations.

This idea is well founded in good intentions, as it aims to approach violence from a disaggregated perspective to offer a better understanding of the geography of violence.  One of the important characteristics of open data is that it functions at a high level of interoperability.  Sundberg and Melander make sure to note that this data set, unlike many other event data sets, can be integrated with a number of other UCDP datasets in order to promote engagement within a broad range of research questions (524).  Though this is not the fault of the authors, I think this data set does provide a good example for one of the downfalls of open data that is the digital divide.  Simply because a data set is put online and labeled open, does not make it accessible to the public.  The authors of this article outline definitions needed to understand what is included, coding decisions made during its production, and other limitations that when presented to a untrained eye would likely go unnoticed.  This has the potential to for misappropriation of data.  For example, this data set from the text may be used by politicians lobbying for an ‘intervention’ of a region on the basis that it is experiencing war and a threat to the world.  Or conversely, the same data may be used by a different group to argue the exact opposite.  Or take the example of the IPCC report, whose predications for global climate change on showed a decrease in artic sea ice cover, which the extractive company Shell then used in their plans to expand artic off shore drilling, ignoring all the other data in the same study explicitly stating the negative externalities of such actions.

The problem I am trying to address surely goes beyond open data as much of the information available today is beyond the scope of understanding of the layman.  In order for humanity to advance, I think this problem needs to be addressed and open data may offer the perfect opportunity to do so.  What if there was a way to make open data more open so to speak?  Obviously, this presents a very challenging task as datasets, geospatial data in particular, seem to inherently demand a level of understanding that is gained through the deliberate study of it’s structure.  However, we once thought the world was flat—so I have faith in our abilities to tackle this problem.

 

-BannerGrey

 

Contextual Sensing

Monday, November 2nd, 2015

The discussion of context-specific sensing, especially the reference by Sagl et al. to internal considerations, is relevant to my topic of spatial cognition. Geo-sensors for smart cities take into account knowledge acquisition of spatial information down to the individual level. Contextual reasoning within the geospatial domain therefore is a vital component for the development of geo-sensors for smart cities. Understanding public perception about urban areas and observing the individual and societal behavioral responses pertains to how greater research in spatial cognition could likely benefit the design of smart city concepts. In addition, the paper’s discussion of mobile based sensors reminds me of papers I am reading for my topic about studies that compare spatial knowledge acquisition of maps to mobile maps. These studies share this article’s examination of the mingled forces that emerge from the interactions between humans, the environment, and technology. Therefore, how do geo-spatial technologies mimic and simultaneously effect how we move through the urban environment?

In addition, the discussion of involuntary geographic information brings to mind how smart cities are faced with ethical dilemmas regarding privacy and human tracking.  Not only does involuntary crowdsourced information reflect the pragmatic ethical issues of the development of geo-sensors for smart cities, but it also brings to light different interpretations and perception of the law and issues surrounding liability.

In addition, can we contribute an increase in democratization to the fact that geo-sensors for smart cities are becoming more dependent on smart-citizen contributions? Do “smarter” citizens really refer to more empowered citizens? I’m slightly skeptical that this is the case, and I find myself agreeing with the authors that, at the moment, there is little indication that the technologies for smart cities have substantially improved the quality of life for its inhabitants. The focus on development and increase of prevalence of geo-sensors in smart cities will not alone yield positive impacts. Instead, we must be critical and focus more on how the sensors are implemented and for what social/societal causes.

-geobloggerRB

The UCDP Dataset: Achieving Information Democracy or Turning Horror into Bland Data?

Sunday, November 1st, 2015

The database described in this paper had both important advantages and limitations. Its ability to spatially locate incidences of violence adds a decidedly geographic component that is missing from nation-level conflict databases. The higher incidence of violence in urban areas in most cases is a particularly interesting finding, though its immediate usefulness is unclear. However, the strict criteria for what constitutes an incidence of conflict meant that the numbers calculated in this study represented only a fraction of the scale of death in the relevant conflicts. While the dataset had a total death count of about 750,000, the civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, for example, resulted in the deaths of approximately 4 million people when considering disease and malnutrition. This discrepancy highlights the true cost of war, in that the scale of destruction is actually much greater than the scale of the violence. With regards to open data, one must ask what the purpose is of making this dataset open to the public. If it stems from a desire for transparency and democracy, I worry that such an analysis is not particularly informative to the general public. Firstly, for those people for whom a sense of scale is necessary for their comprehension of human tragedy, the numbers represent only a fraction of the tragedy. Meanwhile, for the majority of people who require human stories to get a feeling of the horror of war, bland statistics do precious little, and may in fact do more harm than good by desensitizing the public.

– Yojo