=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1273/intro1
|storemode=property
|title=Towards Geographic Information Observatories
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1273/GIO_intro.pdf
|volume=Vol-1273
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/giscience/JanowiczAMK14
}}
==Towards Geographic Information Observatories==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1273/GIO_intro.pdf
Towards Geographic Information Observatories
Krzysztof Janowicz1 , Benjamin Adams2 ,
Grant McKenzie1 , and Tomi Kauppinen3,4
1
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
2
The University of Auckland, New Zealand
3
Aalto University School of Science, Finland
4
University of Bremen, Germany
Abstract. In this work we outline the vision of geographic information
observatories, explain how and why GIScience would benefit from broad-
ening its range to studies of the information universe (without necessarily
relating it back to the physical universe), how our technology stack puts
the GIScience community in a unique position to develop such observa-
tories, and illustrate how these observatories would enable to ask new
questions.
Keywords: Information Universe, Information Observatories, Web Sci-
ence, CyberGIS
1 Introduction
More than two decades ago Geographic Information Science was established as
an interdisciplinary research field and since then has significantly contributed
to the growth and analysis of spatial data from a wide range of sources such as
satellites, mobile devices, and even citizens as sensors. Within the last few years,
the resulting geographic information universe has entered a phase of exponential
growth and today data is available at an ever increasing spatial, temporal, and
thematic resolution. Surprisingly, however, the nature, structure, and evolution
of this information universe is poorly understood.
Historically, a majority of GIScience research has focused on the relation-
ships between information models and the geographic phenomena they repre-
sent. Thus, for instance, researchers have developed methods to compute den-
sity surfaces from point observations that can be used as heatmaps for crime
analysis, wildlife tracking, and so forth. Interestingly, however, there is a lack of
research that expands GIScience towards empirical work on the structure of the
geographic information universe itself.
A better understanding of this universe would yield new insights into how
geo-information can be utilized, what drives the diversification and diffusion
of information, how and why information forms ecosystems, how technological
changes will be reflected by the information universe, whether there are laws
of information science, what spatiotemporal properties of memes are, and so
forth. Such research would explicitly include both observational and experimental
approaches to science.
In the following, we will argue for the need for geographic information obser-
vatories by motivating them in the historical development of GI research, point
out existing trends, give examples, and outline challenges.
2 Historic Perspective and Motivation
GIScience was established to study the concepts and theories that underlie Geo-
graphic Information Systems and other related technologies and thereby allows
to ask more general and foundational questions and to explore topics such as
usability, uncertainty, knowledge representation, or even ethical questions us-
ing scientific methods instead of a purely engineering driven perspective [2].
Nonetheless, for many years GIScience remained a support science which inves-
tigates, develops, evaluates, and optimizes the methods, procedures, and tools
required by scholars in the broader geosciences including geographers, ecologists,
geologists and so forth.
With GIS and GIScience gaining visibility, the developed methods and tools
were applied in other domains inducing archeology, economics, and health re-
search. This led to a further broadening of the GIScience realm, namely the
notion of spatial sciences. The key insight was that many scientific domains
require expertise in spatial aspects or study spaces that are closely related to
geographic space. This gave birth to spatial centers such as spatial@UCSB that
serve as nexus for researchers interested in spatial questions. Examples for in-
volved domains include cognitive and brain sciences, religious studies, chemistry,
the digital humanities, and so forth. Nonetheless, one could argue that GIScience
and spatial science remain supporting sciences that deliver services to other dis-
ciplines. In many geography departments, GIScience and related disciplines are
still categorized under labels such as methods, techniques, computation, and so
forth.1 It is not widely recognized that GIScience is the information science per-
spective on geography and the geosciences. It is on the same level as physical and
human geography. GIScience does not depend on other domains and branches
(of geography) but is a (meta) science in its own right. This, of course, does not
imply that GI researchers should not closely collaborate with their colleagues
in physical and human geography, it just highlights that they have their own
agenda as well.
Over the last years, there have been multiple attempts to overcome the nar-
row perspective outlined above. For instance, Skupin and Fabrikant have in-
vestigated spatialization methods for non-geographic information visualization
[7]. One example for such work is the landscape of a music folksonomy derived
by using a self-organizing map.2 Similar to the case of spatial sciences, the key
insight is that research methods from GIScience can be successfully applied to
apparently non-spatial domains. The changing perspective on the nature and
use of information can also be illustrated by recent work on the foundational
1
The Annals of the Association of American Geographers, for instance, use Methods,
Models, and GIS as section name.
2
See http://cns.iu.edu/docs/research/10-Last.fm.pdf.
aspects of GI research. For example, Couclelis outlines an ontological perspec-
tives on geographic information layers and their semantic contraction [1], while
Kuhn discusses core concepts for spatial information [5]. Note that both explic-
itly focus on characterizing information, not physical reality. Kuhn even argues
that the rationale for his selection of proposed core concepts are informed by
the available of types of spatial data. To give a final example, the Oxford Inter-
net Institute publishes so-called Internet and information geographies under the
slogan understanding life online.
3 Geographic Information Observatories
The notion of a Web Science introduced by [4] calls for an interdisciplinary ap-
proach to study the Web as a large-scale cyber-social-system. Research areas
for Web Science include the interaction between social dynamics, creativity, and
technologies as enablers, dispersion of information on the Web, provenance, trust
and credibility, cyber-crime, new forms of user interaction, motivational topics,
the global knowledge graph, and so forth. Along similar lines, Sheth and oth-
ers proposed Physical-Cyber-Social Computing as a holistic study of data and
knowledge from physical, cyber, and social environments to provide contextually
specific abstractions to human user [6]. To study this new science requires Web
Observatories as “environment[s] that will enable the next generation of interdis-
ciplinary Web Science research involving mixed methods at a global scale [that]
empower researchers by providing a distributed, collaborative, scalable and sus-
tainable online environment to share data, analytical methods and visualization
tools to explore the socio-technical evolution of the Web.” [8, p.1]
Unsurprisingly most existing realizations of such Web observatories make
heavy use of space and time as fundamental ordering principles and thus rely
on Web mapping, spatial analysis, etc., for their user interfaces and interac-
tions. With respect to the used and envisioned technologies to integrate, display,
analyze, and communicate data, those observatories share common ideas with
CyberGIS, the Digital Earth, and spatial data infrastructures. So what would ge-
ographic information observatories look like, how would they differ from existing
work, and why would they be of interest to the GIScience community?
Imagine an observatory that constantly monitors geographic information
from different sources and perspectives, using different types of media, span-
ning multiple themes, attribute-dimensions, resolutions, etc. It would ingest data
from a variety of sources including social media, governments, news portals, and
Internet traffic statistics. Such an observatory would allow us to ask questions
such as whether certain media types and contents show different dispersion pat-
terns, how do new technologies such as Google Glass impact the availability of
information and add new perspectives, how does the appearance of informa-
tion items in relation to specific places forecast events, and whether there are
laws of information science such as the relation between the amount of schema
knowledge versus instance-level data [3].
Additionally, it could provide answers to such questions as how and why geo-
data and technologies are socially embedded, what types of spatialization tech-
niques are most suitable for non-geographic data, what features of unstructured
information are most geo-indicative, what is the typical degree-of-separation be-
tween various categories of information items and information items about lo-
cations and places, how fast is geo-data growing in comparison with other data,
how do privacy concerns relate to changes in the resolution of available geo-data,
and so on. It is worth noting that a large-scale system such as the information
universe has emergent properties that can neither be studied nor predicted by
merely analyzing isolated technical and social effects [4]. Many of these high-
lighted questions are concerned with the nature of information and do not nec-
essarily need to relate back to physical space. Instead, they study the nature
of the densely connected information universe as well as physical-cyber-social
system where humans, technologies, and information form more than the sum
of its parts.
The envisioned GI observatories are more than just a rebranding of the
Digital Earth or CyberGIS visions. In analogy to observatories in astronomy,
oceanography, or volcanology, these GI observatories would form a network of
interconnected installations that are open to researchers and the public, and
that constantly monitor the information universe at a resolution that would be
impossible to achieve for the individual researcher of citizen due to the required
hardware and data processing capabilities. Similar to observatories in astron-
omy, they would have individual ’sensors’ and specialize on different domains,
i.e., they would monitor different types of signals. In case of interesting events
multiple observatories could be targeted at specific regions of the information
universe (that may correspond to regions on the surface of the earth). GI obser-
vatories would not merely monitor the information universe but would make the
full range of spatial analysis and geo-visualization methods publicly available.
Thanks to GIScience’s active role in fields such as Spatial Data Infrastructures
(SDI), CyberGIS, semantics, geo-visualization, spatialization, etc., our commu-
nity is in a great position to lead such effort. To give a concrete example, multiple
GI observatories could monitor social media, news, government data, traffic data,
the flow of money, etc, during the 2014 Ukraine conflict and highlight different
perspectives on the topic.
From an educational perspective, such observatories are not limited to Cloud-
based environments but could actually be physical installations that citizens
can visit. This would hopefully lead to a similar kind of visibility, fascination,
and public support that we see in the field of astronomy that make people
support heavy financial investments for the sake of expanding the frontiers of
our knowledge and understanding. In the 21st century, the information universe
is equally important as the physical universe.
There are, of course, many interesting challenges that have to be address in
order to develop and make use of such GI observatories. In addition to further
work on data integration, big geo-data analysis, workflow composition, scalabil-
ity, uncertainty, spatialization, and so forth, the complex interaction and dynam-
ics between technology, information, and society raises entirely new questions.
One of these questions is geo-privacy. While it has been studied before, we are
only now beginning to realize what it means that trash bins track our location
and movement through cities3 , that geo-information is increasingly stored and
not forgotten, and that the new spatial, temporal, and thematic resolutions of
the data may change human society forever.
References
1. Couclelis, H.: Ontologies of geographic information. International Journal of Geo-
graphical Information Science 24(12), 1785–1809 (2010)
2. Goodchild, M.F.: Geographical information science. International Journal of Geo-
graphical Information Systems 6(1), 31–45 (1992)
3. van Harmelen, F.: Keynote: 10 years of semantic web research: Searching for uni-
versal patterns. In: The Semantic Web - ISWC 2011, pp. 389–389. Springer (2011)
4. Hendler, J., Shadbolt, N., Hall, W., Berners-Lee, T., Weitzner, D.: Web science: an
interdisciplinary approach to understanding the Web. Communications of the ACM
51(7), 60–69 (2008)
5. Kuhn, W.: Core concepts of spatial information for transdisciplinary research. In-
ternational Journal of Geographical Information Science 26(12), 2267–2276 (2012)
6. Sheth, A., Anantharam, P., Henson, C.: Physical-cyber-social computing: An early
21st century approach. Intelligent Systems, IEEE 28(1), 78–82 (2013)
7. Skupin, A., Fabrikant, S.I.: Spatialization methods: a cartographic research agenda
for non-geographic information visualization. Cartography and Geographic Infor-
mation Science 30(2), 99–119 (2003)
8. Tiropanis, T., Hall, W., Shadbolt, N., De Roure, D., Contractor, N., Hendler, J.:
The web science observatory. IEEE Intelligent Systems 28(2), 100–104 (2013)
3
See, for instance, http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/08/no-this-isnt-a-scene-
from-minority-report-this-trash-can-is-stalking-you/