Social Multimedia as Volunteered
Geographic Information:
Crowdsourcing What-Is-Where Through Proximate Sensing
Shawn Newsam
Associate Professor and Founding Faculty
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
University of California at Merced
California Geographic Information Association
3rd Annual Geospatial Summit
UC Merced
April 5, 2013
Volunteered Geographic Information
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Wikipedia:
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Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is the
harnessing of tools to create, assemble, and
disseminate geographic data provided voluntarily by
individuals (Goodchild, 2007).
VGI: OpenStreetMap – Sept. 2009

“OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the
whole world. It is made by people like you.”
GoogleMaps – Sept. 2009
VGI: Flickr

178,016,405 geotagged items (Mar. 14, 2012)
VGI: Flickr
Social Multimedia as VGI

I stipulate that georeferenced social multimedia
can be considered as a form of VGI.



Multimedia = images and video
It is a often a serendipitous form since its original
purpose might not have been for geographic
discovery.
Research challenge is how to extract useful
geographic information in an automated fashion.
Remote sensing: using overhead images of
distant scenes to derive geographic information.
satellite image (Google Maps)
National Land Cover Database (USGS)
Proximate sensing: use ground-level images of objects
and scenes.
study area: 100x100 km region in
southeastern UK
(region TQ in National Grid)
community-contributed photos
(Geograph Britain and Ireland project)
Land Cover Map 2000
(UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology)
?
Proximate sensing: use ground-level images of objects
and scenes.
community-contributed photos
(Geograph Britain and Ireland project)
Image Analysis
Current Work: Land Use