Michael F. Goodchild
University of California
Santa Barbara

• The story so far
• VGI in emergency management
– the nature of trust
• Thematic limits

• The modern era
– authoritative production of geographic information
• official naming
• guarantees of accuracy (or inaccuracy)
– need for economies of scale
• cost of entry
• aerial photography, analytic stereoplotters
• advanced skills
• printing
– generic products
• multiple purposes
• long-lived, emphasizing static phenomena

• Growing demands
– geographic information to support Web services
– wayfinding
– public decision-making
– management
• Legislatures less willing to fund
– efforts to make the user pay
– constraints on the US federal government
• Meltdown in the costs of entry
• Software replacing the need for skills
– soft photogrammetry
– basic cartography
– “anyone can make a map”

• “In other words, the old geography involves a prescribed role/interaction between the four main components, namely the audience, the information, the presenter and the subject, which are common to most standard practises of learning. In
NeoGeography, there are however no such boundaries on roles, ownership, and interactions of these four components.” Rana and Joliveau, Journal of Location-Based Services (in press)
• The citizen as both consumer and producer of geographic information

• The Waldseemüller map
– St Dié-des-Vosges, 1507
– a name that stuck

popvssoda.com

www.openstreetmap.org

www.wikimapia.org

www.wikimapia.org

www.openstreetmap.org

• Recent fires in Santa Barbara
– Zaca Fire (July 07)
• burned for 2 months
• no houses lost
– Gap Fire (July 08)
• burned for 7 days
• no houses lost
– Tea Fire (November 08)
• burned for 2 days
• 230 houses lost

• Important in all three cases
– first photographs of Tea Fire appeared on Flickr in minutes
– maps, text accounts
• Search engines (Google) take a finite time to catalog
– too long for Tea Fire
• Flickr and other site-specific catalogs work much faster
– after Zaca Fire people knew where to look for rapidly available information

• Authoritative information
– must be verified by officials
– too slow for the Tea Fire
• Asserted information
– carries risk of false positives
• false rumor of a fire in Mission Canyon
• some unnecessary evacuations
– people are willing to accept false positives
– lack of authoritative information amounts to false negatives
– false negatives are far less acceptable than false positives
• there were some posted false negatives

www.flickr.com

earth.google.com

nationalmap.gov

• Authority
– inaccuracies are guaranteed
– formal testing programs
– metadata
• Assertion
– inaccuracies are undocumented
– no metadata
– data about popular places tend to be more accurate
– inaccuracies often less than legacy authoritative data

• Placenames, streets, pictures
– georeferencing
– well-defined reference systems and objects
• Free production by citizens replacing authoritative production
• Do other types of geographic information require experts?
– a catalog of types

The FGDC framework layers
• Transportation
– basic network
• rapid updates
– citizens as probes
• real-time congestion
– air quality
• Hydrography
– water quality
• Elevation
– adequate authoritative sources
• Orthoimagery
– cost of entry
• Cadastral
– legal issues
• Administrative units
– legal issues
• Geodetic control
– expertise in geodesy

• Weather and climate
– tradition of amateur observers
– GLOBE
• Biota
– Christmas Bird Count
– e-flora
– phenology
• Soils
– Natural Resource Conservation Service
– mapping for agricultural advice

• An area-class map
– irregular areas denoting uniform soil type
– lengthy descriptions of types
– made by highly trained experts
– sample points
– interpolation from ground observation and aerial photography
– every point assigned to a single class
– expressed in a unique mapping c = f ( x )
• What is the nature of the expertise?

Analysis of sample soils
Aerial photography
Historical records of crop performance
Expert knowledge
Covariates, e.g. elevation, climate, parent material
Scale and accuracy issues
Application knowledge
Application/use case
Application/use case
Application/use case
Application/use case
Application/use case
Application/use case

• Measurement
– GPS
– precision agriculture
• Cartography
– distributed software
• Subject matter
– application-specific
– application-generic
• Local area

• Advanced expertise was needed to make soil maps
• The generic soil map was the result of severe economies of scale
• The costs of entry have fallen almost to zero
• Geographic information on soils can now be purpose-specific
– using purpose-specific expertise
• the farmer
• the gardener

• Specialist meeting in Santa Barbara Dec 13-
14 2007
– NCGIA
– Los Alamos National Lab
– The Vespucci Initiative
– Army Research Office
– http://ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/
• GeoJournal Special Issue edited by Sarah
Elwood
– 72 (3-4): 133-244

• Goodchild, Elwood, Sui
• Three topics
– content and quality (UCSB)
– analysis and synthesis (TAMU)
– social production (UW)
• Case studies
– emergency management (UCSB)
– community development (UW)

• What are the thematic limits?
– filling the social-data gap
– the role of structure in responses
– what about dynamic phenomena?
– ethics
• Preservation
– who will update?
– who will preserve?
• What are the geographic limits?
– where do the contributors live?
– what places do they contribute about?
– http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4125477/Br itish-students-fined-for-illegal-map-making-in-China.html
– http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/2009/jan/15/developingcountries-mapped-good-detail-open-street-map

• What are suitable metrics?
– methods for determining quality?
• The role of metadata
– Wiki-style reviews?
– Metadata 2.0
• Who will organize?
– institutional structures

• A post-modern solution to geographic information production
• Engaging the citizen as both consumer and producer
• Raising fundamental issues about the nature of geographic expertise
• Revolutionizing the practice of geography