Transforming Rural Livelihoods
through Location Intelligence:
The Quiet Revolution in Socializing
Geospatial Science
Stanley Wood, IFPRI
Global Coordinator: CGIAR Consortium on Spatial Information (CSI)
Co-PI: HarvestChoice
Steering Committee Member: AGCommons
ICTs transforming agricultural science, research & technology generation
Science Forum Workshop Theme 3
Definitions & Examples
• Location Intelligence: The place-specific insights
gained by organizing and analyzing complex
phenomena using geographic attributes and
relationships found in all information.
By combining geographic- and location-related
data with HH data, rural poor (especially) can gain
new insights, make better decisions, and fine tune
important processes and applications.
Examples: best varieties & planting windows; best
practices; local prices; input availability; marketing
opportunities (product, land, machine, labour);
infrastructure siting & design, investment targeting
Driving Forces
• Rapid growth in converging & mutually supporting
infrastructure/hardware platforms: $1 GPS chips; lowpower rugged PDAs; cell phone networks; fiber-optic cable;
nanotechnologies; private & developing country RS
expansion; resolution, spectral, repeat, processing & access;
advanced servers & cloud/grid computing.
• Explosion of “neogeography” business & consumeroriented, geospatial applications & tools: Google,
Bing; FOSS & OpenGIS; Satnav & visualization tools, “Mashups”, links to, e.g., photo/doc data & models. Web-based
spatial data sharing, value-addition, e.g., Geo commons.
• Socializing of Geography; GPS ubiquity; Web 2.0
linkages; increasingly spatially-aware public as GIS/RS
technicians/consumers, crowdsourcing (Openstreetmap)
Development Opportunities
• Enhanced two-way flow of timely, highly-targeted,
location-specific and location-intelligent
information, e.g., use of CG outputs in “last 10km”
• Value-addition by integration/synthesis/modeling
services & delivery of location-intelligence
• Validation and expert elicitation of local data
• ‘Public as sensors’ lay data collection, e.g., Kenya:
cell phone a/c credited for delivered data points
• More RS for land use, production, environmental
systems, infrastructure, M&E (change detection),
statistics (crop system area & yield detection).
• Value chain spatial tracking (safety, certification)
Science & Development Issues
• Critical gaps in understanding current and potential
location-specific & time-specific user information needs.
• Licensing strategies to promote public goods sharing &
attribution, & promote innovation by public & private sector
• Protocols for respecting privacy of individuals and
households
• Cell/web access limits (coverage/bandwidth) in rural areas
• ICT access impacts on power structures (PPGIS lessons)
• Integration of socio-economic data (especially with rapidly
changing administrative boundaries)
• Enabling local institutional capacity for service provision
• Quality assurance strategies with crowd-sourced data
• Business models for sustainable location-intelligence
service provision
Location Intelligence & CGIAR MPs
• Enabling Environment: Critical need for support for
awareness & capacity development, sustain internal CoP
linked to key partners, foster the harmonization & sharing
of data, tools, protocols. Assess need to develop and
sustain shared spatial infrastructure (Actors include; CSI,
ICT/KM, AGCommons)
• Cross-cutting Geospatial Service Provision: “Plug and
P(l)ay” geospatial service modules/capacities supporting
individual MPs; map visualization, strategic geographic
targeting, spatial sampling design, location-intelligent value
adding services, scaling-up/out location-specific research
• Advanced Location-intelligent Research Methods:
Increased embedding of spatial analysis tools into the
general research armoury of MP researchers to improve
robustness and significance of research findings.
More Information
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s.wood@cgiar.org
CGIAR Centre Representatives
www.agcommons.org
www.harvestchoice.org
www.geocommons.com
(http://csi.cgiar.org/index.asp) under
reconstruction