ANALYSIS
GEOSPATIAL DATA-GATHERING PROJECTS START TO BEAR FRUIT
Matthew Dovey examines the rise in academic geo-apps and the value of crowd sourcing in gathering data for research
‘T
he next web will be about space and time,’ said Marc Davis, Yahoo’s social media guru in 2008 and, just three years later, we’re seeing his
prediction take firm hold. From counting horse chestnut trees to crime maps of London, the potential of geospatial tools, combined with the possibilities of crowd- sourced data, has started to become clear. 2011 will be remembered as the year that academic geo-apps caught the imagination of the wider public. But should 2012 be the year we marry the excitement of these new tools with a commitment to training our researchers in the skills they need to use the data produced by the tools?
Geospatial information is now ubiquitous – three billion people have access to high- resolution satellite images, there are 400 million Google Earth users and $40 billion is spent each year on collecting geospatial information. Smartphones with built-in spatial location, giving easy access to online maps and apps, are owned by half the UK population. Across Europe, the INSPIRE directive is establishing a ‘spatial information infrastructure in Europe’ – the stitching to bind all the geodata from each of the EU’s national mapping agencies – making data even more accessible and interoperable. Geospatial tools and services are evolving in tandem with this take-up and some of the most exciting and innovative geo-apps are coming out of the higher education sector. JISC in the UK has funded a series of projects to increase the use of geospatial tools, infrastructure (data and services) and information for learners, teachers and researchers. These include GEMMA, from University College, London, which starts at first principles by creating an app to simplify the process of collecting, mapping, preserving, sharing and visualising geospatial datasets. Meanwhile, the Walking Through Time team at University of Edinburgh is developing an app that allows architectural historians, conservationists and
10 Research Information FEB/MAR 2012
10,000 people downloaded the Leaf Watch app and thousands of records were submitted to the project.
tourists to download historical maps when standing in a specific location and then to annotate them.
One of the key benefits to emerge from the
rise of academic geo-apps this year has been the potential to engage the public in crowd- sourcing data for researchers to then work on in the lab. Learners are the focus of the JISC-funded crowd-sourced language app, Cloudbank, and GeoSciTeach. Meanwhile the hit of the year was the Leaf Watch project. It attracted mass media attention with its appealing mix of a fun app to photograph conker trees and the laudable aim of helping researchers to build up a picture of which areas of the UK are affected by a non-
native moth threatening the nation’s horse chestnut trees. 10,000 people downloaded the Leaf Watch app and thousands of records were submitted to the project. In times of austerity, these kinds of initiatives
can seem to offer golden
opportunities to researchers. By using the power of the masses and technology, gathering data from a wide geographical range suddenly becomes possible. According to Dave Kilbey, Leaf Watch’s project manager, ‘it has stripped the barriers to science down and opened up a massive pool of people. Projects that just weren’t feasible before have become possible… as people look to do more with less, this sort of citizen science, crowd-sourced project will be happening a lot more.’
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