Call for Participation: Specialist Meeting on Volunteered Geographic Information Santa Barbara, California, December 13-14, 2007
In the past few years a flood of new web services and other digital sources have emerged that can potentially provide rich, abundant, and timely flows of geographic and geo-referenced information. Collectively they might be termed volunteered sources. They include geotagged entries in Wikipedia, the more specialized place descriptions accumulating in Wikimapia, sites such as OpenStreetMap that support volunteer efforts to create public-domain geospatial data layers, the geotagged photographs of Flickr, and mashups with Google Earth and Google Maps. It is now possible to find out an enormous amount about the geographic domain from such sources, provided they can be synthesized, verified, integrated, and distributed. Such sources have earlier precursors in citizen science, as exemplified by the Christmas Bird Count or Project GLOBE. To date there has been very little investigation of this domain by the research community, despite its potential. We therefore propose to hold a specialist meeting in December 2007 to examine a number of fundamental questions, including: What motivates citizens to provide such information in the public domain, and what factors govern/predict its validity? What methods might be used to validate such information, and to attach appropriate metadata to it? Can VGI be framed within the larger domain of sensor networks, in which inert and static sensors are replaced by, or combined with, intelligent and mobile humans? What limitations are imposed on VGI by differential access to broadband Internet, mobile phones, and other communication technologies, and by concerns over privacy? The specialist meeting will be held at the Upham Hotel in Santa Barbara, beginning early on December 13 and ending late on December 14. It will be organized under the auspices of NCGIA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Vespucci Initiative. Approximately 30 participants will be drawn from the academic, industrial, and governmental sectors. Applications are invited to participate in the meeting, and limited funding is available to support travel and accommodation. Please send a 2-page resume and a 2-page position paper outlining your interest in the topic to [EMAIL PROTECTED] before September 20. Decisions will be announced before September 30. Michael F. Goodchild, UCSB Rajan Gupta, LANL (Alan Glennon, Graduate Associate, Spatial UCSB) -- *********************************************************** Michael F Goodchild National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and Department of Geography Ellison Hall 5707 University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4060, USA Office: +1 805 893 8049 FAX: +1 805 893 3146 Mobile: +1 805 455 6529 ***********************************************************
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