A changing definition for “science”?

January 22nd, 2012

20 years of progress: GIScience in 2010 (Goodchild)

I thought it was interesting how 2 out of the 3 participants Goodchild interviewed had an issue with the word “discovery” when asked about “the ten most important discoveries of GIScience to date” (7). On one hand Marc Armstrong replaces “discovery” with “transformations”, namely from one medium (paper) to another (computer) while Sara Fabrikant replaces the word with “rediscovery”; to her, GIScience is more about seeing the world from a new light. Further, these 2 participants both emphasize the idea that GIScience is the combination of many disciplines and its research is performed in “… a variety of scientific paradigms” (9). Both participants seem to value GIScience as a field that takes an amalgamation of knowledge we already know and applies it to spatial information to access new knowledge that we otherwise could not. They acknowledge GIScience not as a “new” science per se but as a new science born from previous fields of study.

At this point, Network Science springs to mind. Many things about the relatively recent development of network science are similar to that of GIScience. Network science, like GIScience, is interdisciplinary; it draws from and has relevance to many fields. Although scholars have studied networks long ago, they had few unifying theories to show to it, which motivated the formation of a Network Science. The National Research Council writes:

“Despite the tremendous variety of complex networks in the natural, physical, and social worlds, little is known scientifically about the common rules that underlie all networks. This is even truer for interacting networks. Ideas put forth by scientists, technologists, and researchers in a wide variety of fields have been coalescing over the past decade, creating a new field of thinking—the science of networks…
Does a science of networks exist? Opinions differ” (p. 7).

Perhaps these developments in Network and GI Science support the idea mentioned by Wright et al. of a change in the understanding of what constitute as “science” in the modern world.

National Research Council. (2005). Network Science. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005.

-Ally_Nash

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Tool and toolmaking wihtout a science?

January 22nd, 2012

GIS: Tool or Science? (Wright et al.)

Plotting GIS along a continuum of tool, toolmaking and science really helped me clarify my thoughts when it comes to thinking about what we actually mean by “doing GIS”. Personally, I think GIS must be all three things simultaneously. For instance, if GIS was merely a tool, a means to an end, one still needs to choose the appropriate analysis and to interpret the output. How do you judge whether your analysis is appropriate without others studying it through application? Or judge whether your data sets accurately reflects reality? These questions must be explored through GIS research.

However, how the concept of GIS as “toolmaking” can be separated from GIScience is still unclear to me. According to Wright et al., a GIS toolmaker should be able to perform critical analysis of/reflect on the technology’s capabilities and think about the social impacts of the tool (356). But how does one critically analyze and reflect on how well the tool is performing without also being a GIScientist? What kinds of criteria are used to judge whether a tool is good (aka able to visualize/model spatial concepts “correctly” with GIS)? Otherwise, how is a GIS toolmaker any different than a computer scientist or software engineer? This leads me to two conclusions: 1) GIS cannot occupy only one of the three positions on the continuum and 2) the next generation of GIScientists must also well versed in computer languages.

I would have really liked to see the authors elaborate on this new emerging notion of science that is more open. Science is then defined as “the pursuit of systematic and formulated knowledge and as such [it] is not confined to any particular epistemology” (358). How important is it to have to closely tie science to epistemology (positivism)? If we agree with this new definition, can History be considered as much of a “science” as Biology?

– Ally_Nash

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Future issues of GIS – Goodchild reading

January 22nd, 2012

 Goodchild’s (2010) summary of the progress of field-defining debates in GIS over the last 20 years points out several issues. He briefly reminds us of the GI Systems vs. GI Science debate, lists advances and newly identifiable theories in GIS, and poses important questions for the future. Of these issues, two stand out to me as the most pressing for public perception of GIS and the nature of GIS’s data.

How GIS manages to formalize the representation of spatial phenomena across scales is crucial to a wide range of fields. Current tools such as inverse distance weighting allow for interpolating and assigning weights based on geographic location. Even the now-ubiquitous way Google Maps has visually represented different scales (finer details visible only when you zoom in close) has changed how the public imagines different levels. The widespread impact of how GIS represents different scales has enormous potential in facilitating negotiations and public opinion on battles that require mass coordination, such as mitigating climate change. Imagine how the limitations of our current national environmental regulations could be exposed if intuitive software was developed that could easily show the origin and travel of acid rain clouds from individual factories.

Goodchild’s second major point involves the future of volunteered geographic information (VGI) in a world that is increasingly wired and sensored. There is a major deterrent to continued VGI contributions when the “knowing where everything is, at all times” is not properly regulated to handle privacy concerns. This also brings into question how much data in the future will be comprised of VGI, and how much by private interests. The proper intersection of convenience, security, and quality needs to be discussed to ensure that the average citizen’s VGI is fairly represented and is not repurposed by private companies.

– Madskiier_JWong

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GI Systems vs. GI Science – Wright et al reading

January 22nd, 2012

Wright et al.’s paper provided a summarized history of the debate over GIS as a tool or a science and opinions from a forum exchange. I felt that our in-class discussion overemphasized the societal pressures that favour those fields popularly deemed “sciences”. While politicization undoubtedly plays a role, I also accord sciences merit by whether they offer a fundamentally different way of understanding something (and thus generate new knowledge).  

A sticking point from some of the opinions shown in Wright’s paper emphasized that GIS is a tool and a feat of engineering. If this is to be accepted, progress in GIS should be measured merely in terms of faster computing, greater data storage, more efficient processes – linear improvements. Yet, innovations like the incorporation of streaming data provide a new understanding of the temporal dimension of spatial phenomena. Perhaps geographically distanced people tweeting at the same time may be more socially similar than we would expect based on their isolation from one another. Immediate reports about a flood may emerge from a spatially clustered origin, reflecting new understandings of emergent behaviour. Both these examples escape being labelled as simple technological advancements because do-ers of GIS take this raw data and run it through a suite of their own manipulations and methods (e.g. geocode, vectorize, overlay).

Implicitly then, there is evidence of a conscious and rational decision to represent data as maps with linked attribute tables. GIS fundamentally offers a different understanding of what a police station may be: engineering perceives it as load-bearing pillars, level surfaces, and well-joined edges. GIS offers topology, relationships to surrounding polygons, and a correlative effect with nearby crime rates. Thus, I would argue terming GIS as a science has some merit beyond societal pressures.

– Madskiier_JWong

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the ‘Modifiable Area Unit Problem (MAUP)’

January 21st, 2012

Posted by sah:

My interest in Geography lies primarily with issues of health, and human interactions with, and interpretations of, their environments with regards to their health. On that note, in another class I recently completed a literature review discussing the mental health literature and the interpretation of the terms (and thus, environments) “urban” and “rural” as variables influencing depression. I found a great lack in both the quantitative and qualitative description of these terms–most went no further than to throw out a number of people, not even necessarily a density. I think this would be a really interesting subject with which GIS could interact (as a tool, a science, who knows?). What I would like to do is present my seminar on the topic of Modifiable Area Unit Problem (MAUP), and tentatively, in my project, look at how the areas given for the population densities used to define a certain environment (urban or rural) will greatly influence the final qualities of said environments. What is the value and justification given behind the areas for various governmental classifications, for example the Census Metropolitan Area and Census Agglomerations? Hopefully, this problem of “urban” vs. “rural” will lend itself well to an explanation and investigation of the MAUP.

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GIS on a Continuum

January 21st, 2012

Posted by sah:

I think the debate surrounding whether GIS is a tool or a science may have been blown out of proportion in the field of GIS. In fact, I particularly agree with the idea put forth in GIS: Science or Tool? which suggests that GIS may exists along a continuum, from tool to toolmaker to science. Despite this suggestion, the way the author dwells on GIS as a computer application in this paper in my mind express both an underestimation of the power of GIS, as a tool or science, as well as mark on this paper as outdated, a product of its time (1997).

The authors quote Tomlinson, saying, “…Tomlinson was clear enough in his definition of a GIS as a computer application designed to perform certain specific functions…”. To me this implies that GIS is little more than a computer application—a fact repeated later in the article, when the authors say, “Many of those who argued on the ‘tool side’ of the issue could not see how a computer application could be described as a science”. I would argue however that GIS is spatial analysis that can be facilitated by Geographic Information Software. An example discussed in class involves community participatory mapping as a form of GIS, without using a computer, but still ultimately creating a functional product to analyze the space in which this community lives. And this can be made into data points to be input into a computer, if necessary.

So to put it briefly, whether GIS is a science or tool, we must realize today that we cannot underestimate it, for it continues only to evolve, as we can see from the ideological change over just 10+ years since this article was published.

Wright, Dawn J, Michael F. Goodchild, and James D. Proctor. “ForumGIS: Tool or Science?: Demystifying the Persistent Ambiguity of GIS As ‘Tool’ Versus ‘Science’”. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 87.2 (1997): 346-362. Print.

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Twenty Years of Debate

January 21st, 2012

Posted by sah:

Twenty Years of Progress… to me, this translated to Twenty Years of Debate. While reading Goodchild’s article on the evolution of GIScience, the question that came to mind was really, “Why are we still debating”? GIScience, as it is defined by Goodchild, has evolved as a technology, and perhaps discipline, but also largely as a debate, over the last twenty years—and it would appear that it really has been debate that has dominated this field for its recent history. In class we came up with some interesting reasons as to why the debate may still be raging—legitimacy as a field and science, and thus funding and prestige for practitioners being a large aspect of this. That may be all well and good, albeit a topic for another post, but as a topic of Goodchild’s article, I was a little disappointed.

The debate is surely interesting, but was not, according to the abstract and introduction, what the article was expressed to be about: history AND accomplishments and future advancements. There could have been much more emphasis on the successes and evolution, and not just who deems a success a success. Goodchild’s personal reflections and the institutional accomplishments were most interesting, as well as the final section, Looking to the Future. This encapsulated what I anticipated of the article, and highlighted critical thoughts, most interestingly, the proper education of such a rapidly evolving and increasingly popular [tool, technique, science], and the way it can be used by the public. The proposed advancements raise a lot of questions about how GIS can be applied in the future, and what challenges this may present. In my mind, this could in fact be a reason to continue the debate: will we consider this a tool to be properly taught, or a science to be above the everyday use and understanding of the citizen?

Goodchild, Michael F. “Twenty Years of Progress: GIScience in 2010.” Journal of Spatial Information Science. (2010): 3-20. Print.

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Twitter to the rescue of climate change arguments

November 5th, 2010

From PopSci:

Getting into a climate change debate on Twitter could be even more exhausting than it sounds now that a software developer named Nigel Leck has automated the process. Tired of arguing with climate change deniers in 140 character quips, the programmer wrote a script to do it for him. Chatbot @AI_AGW scans Twitter every five minutes searching for hundreds of phrases that fit the usual denier argument paradigm. Then it serves them up some science.

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isn’t technology wonderful?

June 5th, 2010

British Petroleum buys Google and Yahoo search terms to direct searchers to their site. To tell users that BP is wonderful and responsible, of course.

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blame it on the internets

March 23rd, 2010

CITES argues the the Internet has led to huge destruction in habitat and loss of rare species. Namely, the Internet has allowed for a revolution in the way that wildlife is (illegally) traded, to the detriment of species.

Trade on the Web poses “one of the biggest challenges facing CITES,” said Paul Todd, a campaign manager for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

“The Internet is becoming the dominant factor overall in the global trade in protected species,” he said. “There will come a time when country to country trade of large shipments between big buyers and big sellers in different countries is a thing of the past.”

Of course, this ignores the huge benefits that a global medium has in communicating environmental problems and allowing for social mobilization. We might not even know about the problems facing the Kaiser’s spotted newt were it not for the Internet. A small community in the developing may not be able to work together with other impacted communities or gain support from international non-governmental organizations were it not for the Internet. Still it points to the two-edged sword of the new media and the fact that media are not simply transparent communication tools.

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can geospatial technologies benefit the poor?

February 14th, 2010

From student, AK, Intro GIS, taken from GIS, GPS, and Remote Sensing by Uwe Deichmann and Stanley Wood

The role of information and communication technologies in assisting rural development is drawing increasing attention. It promises to help isolated and disenfranchised communities transform themselves into development participants who are better informed and integrated.

GIS provides tools for visualizing, integrating, and analyzing spatial data and a unique capacity to merge information from many sources. By using a common spatial framework, GIS enables users to analyze how physical, social, and economic factors interact. Constraints to widespread use of GIS have been its high cost and complexity and the difficulty of obtaining geographically referenced (geo-referenced) data. However, as the technology has become cheaper and less complex, it has become more accessible to non-specialists.

GPS and remote-sensing techniques have reduced the problem of obtaining geo-referenced information. For instance, most field surveys now use GPS to capture the location of sample points, such as plots or households, enabling easy visualization of survey results and integration with other geographic data. GPS receivers range from the handheld models that are inexpensive, easy to use, and provide coordinate accuracy of about 10 meters to differential receivers that yield accuracy in centimeters. Great advances also have been made in remote sensing and aerial photography. Image processing techniques generate digital maps from aerial photos or satellite data that combine the accuracy of a topographic map with the richer contextual information of a photograph.

Until recently, geospatial technologies have benefited the rural poor mostly indirectly, by generating improved information for research, policy analysis, planning, and monitoring. Precision farming techniques are used in high-intensity commercial agriculture, where detailed location information determines, for example, the level of fertilizer applied to each portion of a field. However, the capital, maintenance, and training requirements are well beyond the means of most farmers in developing countries, particularly smallholders whose small field sizes make these technologies uneconomic.

One of the most direct applications of GIS in developing countries is participatory mapping, where, for example, specialists interact with farming communities to create spatial inventories of natural resources, property status, land-use rights, and perceived problems. Such inventories feed into a consultative process aimed at building consensus on more equitable and sustainable resource-management arrangements. Community mapping can also help foster the process of transferring greater decision-making power and fiscal responsibility to local levels of government. GIS is increasingly being used widely in parcel mapping. Without proper land registration, it can be argued that formal land markets are less efficient and the incentives to invest in land conservation might be limited.

Questions can arise about the political economy and sustainability of GIS approaches applied at the community level, and research on those issues has given rise to a literature on Public Participation GIS (PPGIS). Research primarily addresses concerns about GIS as an invasive technology that benefits a few elites and institutions while marginalizing the very people it’s supposed to help. While this work has often focused on developed-country experiences, its concerns are even more pertinent to poor communities in developing countries. PPGIS issues include:

  • Changes in local politics and power relationships resulting from the use of GIS in geospatial decision-making.
  • The effects of differential access to GIS hardware, software, data, and expertise
  • The educational, social, political, and economic reasons for lack of access and exemplary ways in which communities have overcome these barriers
  • The ways in which socially differentiated communities and their local knowledge might best be represented within GIS
  • GIS as local surveillance
  • Identifying public data policies that positively or negatively influence small-scale local businesses.

Geographic information technologies will continue to provide considerable indirect benefits through better-informed policymaking, research, planning, and development support by both government and non-government agents. But we need to continually reexamine the direct benefits.

Take for example, the “2020 Vision for Food, Agriculture, and the Environment“. This is an initiative of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to develop a shared vision and a consensus for action on how to meet future world food needs while reducing poverty and protecting the environment. Through the 2020 Vision initiative, IFPRI is bringing together divergent schools of thought on these issues, generating research, and identifying recommendations. In an initiative such as this, GIS can be used extensively to identify and model any aspect that is spatially distributed, for example, mapping gender assets, tracking movement of food from rural to urban areas, conducting site selections of optimal farming locations by crop, modeling equitable water allocation, and possibly applying precision agriculture.

IFPRI promotes a vision for food access for the greatest good, that assists the poor while not irreparably hurting the environment. But who might get left out in a consensual “greatest good” vision? Women’s subsistence farming but not men’s cash crop farming? Women in these developing countries often have their own local knowledge about food production that differs from men. What if the communities themselves want to map and analyze: do they have the access to the satellite images and computers? Communities may have their own alternate or small scale means of producing food that varies from getting out food to the largest number of peoples. Technologies have been developed like Google Earth and have been used by indigenous people to monitor illegal activities on their land, for example logging. What happens after the experts leave? It’s these things that we need to reflect on when we promote GIS for rural development.

References
Peter A. K. Kyem, James Saku. 2009. Web-Based GIS and the Future of Participatory GIS Applications Within Local and Indigenous Communities. GISP Department of Geography Central Connecticut State University New Britain, USA. EJISDC Vol. 38.

Daniel Weiner, Trevor M. Harris. 2003. Community-Integrated GIS for Land Reform in South Africa. URISA Journal, Vol. 15.

Renee Sieber. 2006. Public Participation GIS: A Literature Review and Framework. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Volume 96, Number 3 , pp. 491-507.

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the green computer

February 12th, 2010

We can only hope that the toxin-free PCs are as advertised:

IT and business transformation services company Wipro Infotech is the first Indian company to build a 100% recyclable and toxin-free computer. Wipro joins a small number of manufacturers worldwide to develop toxics-free electronics.

The eco-friendly Wipro Greenware desktops are manufactured to be completely free from harmful chemicals such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs).

The challenge, of course, is to ensure that, once its lifespan is done, there is a reputable place to recycle the Wipro.

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GIS Applications in Epidemiology

December 30th, 2009

Thanks, JZ for the post

Applications of GIS aren’t new to epidemiology. Dating back to 1854, during a cholera outbreak in London’s Soho district, Dr. John Snow plotted the location of every individual case on a map and determined that they were distributed in a certain pattern that was linked to a contaminated water pump used by the local citizens. Now GIScience is being used to used to track the spatial distribution of all sorts of diseases.

H1N1 is a current epidemiological problem. Although H1N1 has been tracked since the outbreak, a lack of effective analysis tools (and countermeasures, of course) meant that the flu spread throughout the world within a few months. According to the latest update from the WHO, over 11,516 have died in the pandemic.

ESRI’s GIS is being used to track H1N1. According to ESRI’s own whitepaper, ‘GIS and Pandemic Influenza Planning and Response’, ESRI believes that geographic accuracy is essential in any infectious disease outbreak, and GIS applications can be critical in assessing risks, evaluating threats, tracking outbreaks, and ensuring the focused allocation of resources (e.g., vaccines and antivirals).

GISs tend to be rather static in their ability to model time. What is especially important is to be able to dynamically run a geospatial model of the outbreak. According to a recent article in Nature, agent-based modeling (ABM) can be used in modeling the disease’s possible spread, and designing policies for its mitigation. The ABM is basically an artificial society. Every person is represented by an autonomous software agent. Agents interact with each other; the computer tracks the agents’ health status as they interact in the virtual social network. Unlike classical epidemic modeling which based on differential equations, the ABM can simulate the complexity of social network. ABMs can be used to answer questions like, ‘What if a significant number of people refuse the H1N1 vaccine out of fear?’ ‘What is the best way to allocate the limited supplies of vaccines?’ or ‘How effective are school closures?’

A U.S. scale ABM (containing 300 million agents) can be run in approximately 10 minutes and can present the results on a map-based interface. Thus GIS and ABMs can provide the decision-makers a quick feedback on how their interventions work. As H1N1 moves through time and space and other possible pandemic influenza emerge in the future, GIS and ABM will play important roles in improving the efficiency of health agencies.

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Geospatial Technology to for Wildlife Management and Conservation

December 28th, 2009

From KT, Intro GIS.

Geospatial technology, especially GIS, is often viewed as an application for analyzing and understanding social distributions (e.g., literacy rate, birth rate, and death rate). Increasingly, geospatial technology is used to monitor wildlife migration to better understand and develop conservation and management techniques.

In the Achanakmar Wildlife Sanctuary in India researchers measured a variety of variables to determine suitable habitat space for tigers. To develop the model, GIS data layers for the area were created by digitizing topographic maps (i.e., contours, roads, and settlement patterns). Satellite information was used for forest type and forest density. Forest type information was derived using a false colour composite. To complete the data sets, researchers also collected field data on the ground truth of forest type, current habitat area and the habitat area of prey. They also performed a statistical analysis. The result was a map that illustrates habitat suitabile for tigers.

A similar study was undertaken in Florida to analyze suitable habitat areas for the highly endangered Florida panther. The method of this study however differed slightly from that of the tiger study. Here, researchers used GIS to overlay maps of many different parameters (i.e., land type, road structure, vegetation, and protected areas). They obtained shapefiles from government and private sources. Their conclusions mimicked what was seen in the tiger study: only small regions are suitable for long-term panther sustainability.

The GIS approach to these problems is particularly important because it is repeatable over time as variables such as land use and forest type change. It also gives researchers a large spatial context and ensures that maps and models only contain relevant information. I think these models are very useful, as they provide a way for a researcher or conservation official to easily look at many variables and how the variables overlay each other spatially.

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preserving North American indigenous cultures with GIS

December 28th, 2009

Thanks, NM for this post…

GIS is the branch of geography that generates the most interest from the wider public these days, with geographic apps ranging from Google Maps to trip advisor. Yet when it comes to talk up about its integration in indigenous communities, this optimism suddenly turns into mistrust because of the history of Western imposition of culture (including technology!) on traditional cultures. Nevertheless, it has been proved in many of those same communities that it can constitute an effective tool for perpetuating their cultures.

The idea is fairly simple. By going into North American Native communities, researchers have been able to collect certain types of information on the environment and pinpoint it in GISs, which can then be used to educate the community. This information includes photographs, videos, stories and other traditional knowledge elements in both English and the local language. An example of this is the Names-Places Project, which has been active in Idaho with the Coeur d’Alene Tribe for more than fifteen years and for which Elders have shared their knowledge about the environment.

According to senior archeologist Ben Hjermstad, who works with Saskatchewan’s First Nations, it is a good way to contribute to youth education. “It is showing them how people have used the land for hundreds of generations” as he says, while also creating “a link between the Elders of the nation and the youth”. GIS also can be a useful tool for land management for indigenous peoples as it displays both scientific and cultural information about the landscape, thereby giving them greater ability to negotiate when a development project is proposed to the community. For instance, if a project of forestry activity comes up in the nation, they will know whether or not the area is already reserved for gathering traditional medicinal plants or if it contains burial grounds.

It is clear that such a body of cultural information might end up in the hands of malicious people if it were to be available to everyone. This is why a confidentiality agreement, which stipulates that the information displayed on the maps is the local communities’ property, exists between First Nations and the people who help create the maps, and why indigenous communities are glad that they can password-protect those maps.

Many indigenous peoples like the idea that there is a way to digitally take stock of their environment, but their satisfaction lies in the fact that this information can also be cultural. Indeed, this method may enable them to perpetuate a rich culture that is intertwined with a deep respect for nature. “The land is our heaven and our wealth” says Innovative GIS Solutions president Jhon Goes In Center, a Lakota Indian in Fort Collins, Colorado. Moreover, the fact that such work can be made available in both English and indigenous languages, that is in the languages the people who both study and live the effects of land exploitation, might also show an open-mindedness that will prove increasingly fruitful as issues such as climate change must be addressed.

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opening up GIS to urban planning through open source

December 22nd, 2009

Thanks, PB, for the post

Geospatial technologies have once again paved the way for a new social learning experience. Mark Gordton, the mind behind Limewire, has teamed up with a team familiar with geospatial editing to bring you GeoServer: an open source urban planning app. This new project allows users to map out their transportation routes and daily geographical events to then vote for more bicycles paths or public transportation. Also, users will be able to vote on whether they would rather have a gas station or a public park built on a new piece of land. Much like Google Maps allows its users to customize maps to display routes on a pre-existing grid, GeoServer hopes to provide similar urban planning opportunities.

Thomas K. Wright, who is executive director of the Regional Plan Association, is very positive about its potential:

“99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym….Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards… [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field.”

GeoServer is allowing citizens to voice their concerns and be engaged in community planning processes.

This is going to have some very beneficial effects on the way urban planning can and will be undertaken. Planners will now have access to information from the people themselves about what they want and what they think would be beneficial for the neighbourhoods with which they are most familiar. With these tools at their disposal, non-expert residents will be more involved and tools like this will allow for more of a democratic approach to urban planning decisions.

Possibly the most important aspect of allowing the average person to voice their concern without having knowledge of planning practice and/or Geospatial Information Systems is the question of compatibility among user information and program datasets. Luckily GeoServer can display the spatial and mapped data people upload to a P2P server onto various mapping software/application [ArcGIS or Google Maps]

This new program is just another step in the growing world of open source media and peer to peer sharing of ideas, files and information. GeoServer is just another step in adapting to and planning for our world’s ever increasing complexity and interconnectivity.

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Use of Digital Earths for Good and Evil

December 18th, 2009

CH, from Intro GIS, continues our surveillance posts…

Google Earth is a virtual globe that contains fairly high resolution images of certain locations on the globe. A multi-featured version of Google Earth has been freely available to the public since its release several years ago. Users can browse the entire globe where they can search and zoom into cities, places of interest and specific addresses. Anyone who has the minimum requirements necessary to run Google Earth, can use it however they please. This unrestricted use of Google Earth may pose an alarming security threat. Although certain government facilities are hidden on it, terrorists and criminals have used what is available to commit crimes with precision and efficiency thanks to the satellite pictures. It is alarming that a group like the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade have admitted to using this freeware to plan and execute attacks on Israel. The use of Google Earth for attacks like this is one of the results of such accurate, complex imagery being provided for anyone and everyone to access.

Another example of when this information has been accessed by the wrong people was the 2008 Mumbai terror attack on two luxury hotels. The terrorists responsible were able to familiarize themselves with the area of their attack that left 171 dead. There is no question that without free programs such as Google Earth, terrorist attacks will not stop, but they simply make it that much easier for the terrorists to carry out such attacks. It makes sense to block out sensitive information and images; however, this alone will not prevent the ability to plan attacks on the public. It would be far to difficult for authorities or Google to screen each user, every time they look something up. This would also raise privacy issues for the common user. The concept of virtual earths is a complicated one that will always have safety and privacy issues due to the function it performs.

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Africa GIS International Conference

December 17th, 2009

The Africa GIS International Conference is held every two years to discuss problems with and applications of GIS across the African continent. The conferences in 2005 and 2007 were held in South Africa and Burkina Faso respectively, while this year’s conference was held in October in Kampala, Uganda. The conference deals with identifying the limitations of Africa’s current geo-information technologies and systems and its goal is to discuss possible solutions and set up relationships between individuals and organizations collecting data throughout the continent. The conference is a place for geo-information specialists to gather and share new developments, as well as to find others who would be interested in contributing to new projects. It also provides a forum for data and ideas to be shared, and for pressing issues to be brought to attention.

The problems facing Africa today numerous and complex, and every two years the conference draws up a list of themes to focus on and invites people to present papers and projects in those fields. This allows the conference to focus on problems that are unique to the continent, and create geo-information systems and datasets that are specifically suited to these problems. The themes for this year’s conference were climate change, natural resource management, challenges created by urbanization and the business aspect of creating and storing data in Africa. From these themes we can see that the difficulties are all related to development. The countries themselves are still developing and coping with impacts on their environment and natural resources, as well coping with the emergent infrastructure that is lagging behind the rapid development or urban centers and the rapid rise in population. GIS can be used to monitor these changes and to analyze them to be better prepared to respond to them, but a lack of infrastructure will limit their data collection and distribution, as well as storage and analysis. Since the first conference in 2005, Spatial Data Infrastructure has been an important topic, and part of Africa GIS’ goals is to bring people together who can created this infrastructure, share information and communicate with outside sources who could provide data to fill in the gaps, such as high quality satellite imagery.

The challenges of a developing nation can be overwhelming, and these conferences may be placing a lot of hope in Geographic Information Science to resolve these issues, but since a recently developed technology is being applied to a situation where nothing of the sort has previously been attempted, it can be done right the first time instead of having to correct datasets and procedures that were begun decades ago. This is a chance to create a community of geo-information specialists in Africa where data and ideas are shared to bring new developments and advances to this system as soon as they arise. Hopefully this conference can facilitate the sharing of information and the creation of a standard for GIScience in Africa, and can be used to find new approaches to the problems at hand.

Thanks to VB, Intro GIS

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all eyes on North Korea

December 17th, 2009

Though stringent border security and diplomatic isolation may give North Korea the reputation of a “hermit kingdom,” geospatial technology allows Westerners, from the comfort of their personal computers, to view past the smiling gymnasts of the Pyongyang Mass Games and explore the workings of the world’s most secretive society. An initiative called North Korea Uncovered uses Google Earth as a platform for mapping North Korea’s features- from power lines to government offices to forced labor camps. Since it launched in May 2007, the project has added features successively to their publicly-available map. The latest version, released in June 2009, contains thousands of point, line, and polygon features sorted into dozens of layer categories and hundreds of subcategories. As a mashup, the project maintains active links between locations on the map and online information resources; for example, at the mapped entrance to Labor Camp 15, users can click on a link to a Youtube video containing footage of the camp.

To supplement Google Earth’s remotely sensed images of North Korea (most of which come from SPOT), the project matches higher-resolution aerial photos and maps to the ground layer of satellite imagery. For instance, see the image embedded below containing a high-resolution photo of Camp 15 matched to the SPOT satellite graphic.

The creators of the project are receptive to user-contributed content. Because very few members of the general public have access to information on North Korea, most information comes from self-selecting experts including former members of the US military, political researchers, and North Korean expatriates. Curtis Melvin, who began the project, cross-checks all submitted information to maintain the site’s credibility and accuracy. Information is contributed to the system in a method known as “crowd sourcing.” When the project was launched, the directors posted it on relevant websites in an effort to attract attention and information from the “crowd,” or unidentified public. The submitted information becomes the property of the project itself, rather than the submitter. Many nonprofit internet information projects use this same model, as do many private businesses (which sometimes even offer financial rewards for information submissions). The key uniqueness and power of crowd sourcing is that, by encouraging any member of the informed public to contribute their knowledge, valuable information can come from sources the project organizers would never have known to consult.

The implications of a project like “North Korea Uncovered” shake our notions of power structure in the age of the Internet. Thanks to the simple technique of crowd sourcing and the knowledge of scattered members of the public, anybody with access to the Internet can view information which a totalitarian regime has dedicated itself to restricting. However, questions must be drawn to Google’s role in disseminating and controlling such information. With its history of catering to China’s demands on restricting information, can users rely on Google Earth to provide a groundwork for information sharing of a controversial nature? If a similar project called “The US Army Uncovered” were initiated by members of the public to investigate conditions at US war prisons, would Google make its system equally available to their use? It is ironic that in this age of information overload, crowd sourcing, and public data sharing via the Internet, we still rely on either private corporations or government agencies, in spite of their priorities or agendas, to provide us mediums for information exchange such as Digital Earths and search engines.

From JL, Intro GIS

Posted in 201, geographic information systems, surveillance | 2 Comments »

Greener Streets Thanks to GPS?

December 13th, 2009

Nitrogen oxide and reactive hydrocarbons from motor vehicle exhaust make up the majority of urban pollution. This, along with ever increasing congestion, has prompted Dutch legislators and environmental activists to attempt to change driving patterns. The Nederlands government has decided to abolish its annual road and car purchase tax for drivers and instead to charge the average car 0.03€ per kilometre driven, and an even higher rate for driving done during rush hour or periods of congestion. For larger automobiles, trucks and commercial vehicles, this charge will be even higher, considering that these motor vehicles emit more pollutants. The kilometre tax will increase every year until 2018 (when it will reach 0.068€), and will be augmented if driving patterns do not change. But how will the government monitor how much each individual is driving and during which times? By using Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking technology. By 2012, a monitoring device will be installed in every car in the Netherlands and will track the amount of kilometres traveled, the time of travel and the location of the vehicle. This information will then be sent to a billing agency.

The Dutch government is pressed to do something about vehicle use, because their road network has some of the most congested and often used roads in all of Europe. With the GPS technology in place, the Dutch Ministry of Transportation hopes that congestion will decrease on roads during rush hours, and there are already estimates that overall driving will decrease by 15 percent and that rush hour congestion will be halved. On top of this, the ministry also hopes that car accidents will decrease by 7 percent due to less stressed drivers, and that carbon emissions will decrease by 10 percent. There are several opponents in this debate, because firstly, people who drive for business reasons will be heavily taxed, and it could cost the government over 1 billion Euros ($1.5 billion US) in tax income that would otherwise be earned by an annual road tax. At the same time, some argue that the GPS system will be like “Big Brother” –-constantly monitoring the locations of drivers at all hours. However, the Ministry of Transportation has assured the public that the information from the individual GPSs would be “legally and technically protected” and that the data would only be available to the government for the purpose of kilometre billing.

Other countries are also considering this option as a way of reducing car use, but it must be remembered that the Netherlands is roughly the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and, unlike Canada, has an extensive and highly developed public rail and transportation network. This means that commuting from rural to urban areas or vice versa is far less of a problem than it would be in a Canadian city. If this kilometre tax were to be implemented in a city like Toronto for example, those living in rural areas and being forced to commute into the city would often have no choice other than to drive, there being no alternatives available. At the same time, it has not yet been talked about what occurs when an in-car GPS system breaks down. And what happens when the noise, bias or blunder errors from GPS are so bad that individuals are being charged fines that do not correspond to the number of kilometres they drove? Lastly, GPS satellites are owned by the U.S. military. Without an agreement or contract, the Dutch government cannot be sure that this service will be available to them forever and at all periods of time. Despite these possible problems, it is good to see that governments are finally taking serious action to decrease the use of motor-vehicles, even if this means accepting a little help from Big Brother.

Thanks, MV, Intro GIS

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