Citizen Science 2019: Environmental Justice and Community Science: A Social Movement for Inpowerment, Compliance, and Action

The session was opened by Na’Taki Osborne-Jelks, Agnes Scott College (CSA board) - the environmental justice movement have used methods of community science we need to include in the tent of citizen science. There are 60 participants in the conference that are supported by the NSF to participate in the conference. There was a special effort …

Esri User Conference – Science Symposium

  As part of the Esri User Conference, Dawn Wright, Esri Chief Scientist, organised a Science Symposium that gave an opportunity for those with interest in scientific use of Esri GIS to come together, discuss and meet. Dawn Wright opened and mentioned that the science symposium is aimed to bring people people from different areas: …

Esri User Conference 2016 – plenary day

The main Esri User conference starts with a plenary day, where all the participants (16,000 of them) join together for a set of presentation from 8:30 to 3:30 (with some breaks, of course). Below you'll find some notes that I took during the day: The theme of the keynote was GIS – Enabling a Smarter …

Esri Education Conference 2016 – day 1

I've been working with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) since 1988. During the first 2 years, I wasn't even aware that what we were doing was GIS - it was a mapping/inventory system that run on second generation PC (80286 processors) and was used to map facilities. Once I've discovered that this was a GIS, the …

Esri Education User Conference talk: Citizen Science & Geographical Technologies: creativity, learning, and engagement

The slides below are from my keynote talk at the Esri Education User Conference 2016. The conference focused on creativity and its relevant to education and the utilisation of GIS (especially Esri software) at different levels of education. My talk explored the area of citizen science and extreme citizen science and the way geographical technologies …

Extreme Citizen Science in Esri ArcNews

The winter edition of Esri ArcNews (which according to Mike Gould of Esri, is printed in as many copies as Forbes) includes an article on the activities of the Extreme Citizen Science group in supporting indigenous groups in mapping. The article highlights the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) aspects of the work, and mentioning many members of …

Building Centre – from Mapping to Making

The London based Building Centre organised an evening event - from Mapping to Making -  which looked at the "radical evolution in the making and meaning of maps is influencing creative output. New approaches to data capture and integration - from drones to crowd-sourcing - suggest maps are changing their impact on our working life, …

OpenStreetMap studies (and why VGI not equal OSM)

As far as I can tell, Nelson et al. (2006) 'Towards development of a high quality public domain global roads database' and Taylor & Caquard (2006) Cybercartography: Maps and Mapping in the Information Era are the first peer-reviewed papers that mention OpenStreetMap. Since then, OpenStreetMap has received plenty of academic attention. More 'conservative' search engines such as …

Happy 10th Birthday, OpenStreetMap!

Today, OpenStreetMap celebrates 10 years of operation as counted from the date of registration. I've heard about the project when it was in early stages, mostly because I knew Steve Coast when I was studying for my Ph.D. at UCL.  As a result, I was also able to secured the first ever research grant that focused …

Second day of INSPIRE 2014 – open and linked data

Opening geodata is an interesting issue for INSPIRE  directive. INSPIRE was set before the hype of Government 2.0 was growing and pressure on opening data became apparent, so it was not designed with these aspects in mind explicitly. Therefore the way in which the organisations that are implementing INSPIRE are dealing with the provision of open …