Geographic Information Science and Citizen Science

Thanks to invitations from UNIGIS and Edinburgh Earth Observatory / AGI Scotland, I had an opportunity to reflect on how Geographic Information Science (GIScience) can contribute to citizen science, and what citizen science can contribute to GIScience. Despite the fact that it's 8 years since the term Volunteers Geographic Information (VGI) was coined, I didn't assume that …

Advertisement

How geoweb fossils become unusable

Once upon a time, Streetmap.co.uk was one of the most popular Web Mapping sites in the UK, competing successfully with the biggest rival at the time, Multimap. Moreover, it was ranked second in The Daily Telegraph list of leading mapping sites in October 2000 and described at 'Must be one of the most useful services on …

OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey Meridian 2 comparison – 2008 – 2011

In March 2008, I started comparing OpenStreetMap in England to the Ordnance Survey Meridian 2, as a way to evaluate the completeness of OpenStreetMap coverage. The rational behind the comparison is that Meridian 2 represents a generalised geographic dataset that is widely use in national scale spatial analysis. At the time that the study started, …

Google Geo applications – deteriorating interfaces?

While Google wasn’t the first website to implement slippy maps – maps that are based on tiles, download progressively and allow fairly smooth user interaction – it does deserve the credit for popularising them. The first version of Google Maps was a giant leap in terms of public web mapping applications, as described in our …

Web Mapping 2.0 – an introduction to Neogeography in Geography Compass

In October 2007, Francis Harvey commissioned me to write a review article for Geography Compass on Neogeography. The paper was written in collaboration with Alex Singleton at UCL and Chris Parker from the Ordnance Survey. The paper covers several issues. Firstly, it provides an overview of the developments in Web mapping from the early 1990s …

The new London crime mapping website

The Metropolitan Police Authority has released a beta version of their new Crime Mapping application, showing the generalised level of crime (burglary, robbery and vehicle) for Lower-level Super Output Areas (LSOAs). The application uses generalised boundaries of LSOAs , and use a clear classification of the level of crime. Interestingly, the Show Us a Better …

The British Museum Test for public mapping websites

Back in 2005, when I worked with Artemis Skarlatidou on an evaluation of public mapping websites, we came up with a simple test to check how well these search sites perform: Can a tourist find a famous landmark easily? The reasoning behind raising this question was that tourists are an obvious group of users of …

The Environment Agency’s Pollution Maps and how not to present environmental information

As part of the Mapping Change for Sustainable Communities project, we organised the first workshop in the Royal Docks area, at the Sunborn Yacht Hotel last Saturday (27/10). The workshop was very successful and, as I usually do in these workshops, I start with 'what mapping information can we find on the WWW about your …