Link-VGI: LINKing and analyzing Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) across different platforms

Link-VGI is a single-day pre-conference workshop at the AGILE 2016 Conference in Helsinki, Finland on June 14th 2016. The workshop will be held in Helsinki University Main building, Fabianinkatu 33, Helsinki.

Link-VGI: LINKing and analyzing Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) across different platforms

Link-VGI is a single-day pre-conference workshop at the AGILE 2016 Conference in Helsinki, Finland on June 14th 2016.

Link-VGI: Workshop Summary

The number of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and social media platforms is continuously growing, providing massive datasets of georeferenced content that is either actively contributed (e.g. adding data to OSM, Mapillary, or Flickr) or collected through more passive modes (e.g. enabling geolocation in Twitter feeds). Whereas contribution behavior for individual crowdsourcing applications has already been extensively analyzed in the literature, it is less understood if and how users participate in several crowd sourcing activities. Hence several research questions relevant to a better understanding of community involvement in data contributions have evolved. These include for example, whether activity spaces in different sources are spatially co-located or spatially distinct for individual contributors, or whether contributor communities evolve across platforms. As an example, users started to cross-link data from different platforms, e.g. by mapping OSM point of interests (POIs) and street features (e.g. street lamps, sidewalk information) based on Mapillary photographs, or by tagging Flickr pictures with OSM tags.

This workshop provides an opportunity for interested researchers to share ideas and findings on cross-platform data contributions. One portion in the workshop is dedicated to a hands-on session. In this session, basics of spatial data access through selected APIs and the extraction of summary statistics of the results will be illustrated.

The informal summary of the discussions which took place during the open floor discussions are now available.
Summary of Open Floor Discussions

Link-VGI: Workshop Structure

The workshop will be held on Tuesday June 14th 2016 09:00 – 18:00 before the main AGILE 2016 conference at Helsinki, Finland. Participants must be registered on the AGILE website. Tea/Coffee and lunch breaks will be provided to participants in the workshop buildings. LinkVGI is one of several workshops being held in parallel as pre-conference workshops.

At the workshop, there will be two paper presentation sessions in the morning, and a hands-on practice session in the afternoon. This will be followed by an open floor forum where the participants can discuss identified research questions. The discussion will be moderated and wrapped up by Dr. Mooney. This will act as a catalyst for future collaborations amongst the workshop participants leading to future workshops, journal publications, or potential Horizon 2020 targets etc.

The workshop programme is available below. All materials (notes, summaries, etc) will be made openly available from the workshop website as soon as possible during or after the event. The scheduling of the workshop is structured to synchronise with the other AGILE 2016 workshops for coffee and lunch breaks.

Link-VGI: Workshop Programme

09:00 - 09:15 Welcome Welcome, goals for the day, logistics, etc
Dr. Peter Mooney (Maynooth University, IE)
09:15 - 9:45 LINK-VGI research at the 3 organizing institutions - short presentations
  • Dr. Hartwig Hochmair/Levente Juhász (University of Florida)
  • Dr. Alexander Zipf/Dr. Adam Roussell (University of Heidelberg)
  • Dr. Peter Mooney (Maynooth University, IE) Maynooth University VGI Work
09:45 - 10:30 Paper session 1: 2 presentations (45 minutes) [Chair: Hartwig Hochmair] "Applications of Across-platform VGI"
10:30 - 11:00 Tea and Coffee Break (30 minutes) - With the other AGILE 2016 Workshops
11:00 - 12:30 Paper session 2: 4 presentations (90 minutes) [Chair: Alexander Zipf] "Across ‒ platform VGI Semantic and Ontologies"
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch Lunch with other AGILE workshops (90 minutes)
14:00 - 15:30 Hands-on session part 1 (90 minutes) [Presenters and Facilitators: Levente Juhász (University of Florida), Jamal Jokar Arsanjani (Aalborg Copenhagen University), Adam Rousell (University of Heidelberg)]
"VGI data linkage: Accessing, linking, and analyzing data from multiple platforms"
Presentation Slides for the Hands-on session
15:30 - 16:00 Tea and Coffee Break (30 minutes) - With the other AGILE 2016 Workshops
16:00 - 17:00 Hands-on session part 2 (60 minutes) [Presenters and Facilitators: Levente Juhász (University of Florida), Jamal Jokar Arsanjani (Aalborg Copenhagen University), Adam Rousell (University of Heidelberg)] "VGI data linkage: Accessing, linking, and analyzing data from multiple platforms"
17:00 – 17:45 Open floor discussion (45 minutes) "Identifying research issues, core questions and plans for future collaborations and publications" [Moderator: Peter Mooney] - all participants of the workshop are invited to participate. Download The Flyer for the Open Floor Session in PDF format
17:45 - 18:00 (15 minutes - Closing) [Rapporteur: Peter Mooney]
Final remarks, overall impressions, summary, and goodbye.

Hands-on Session: VGI data linkage: Accessing, linking, and analyzing data from multiple platforms

The hands-on session will be presented and facilitated by Levente Juhász, Jamal Jokar Arsanjani and Adam Rousell

The first section intends to provide a brief overview of the basics of interacting with APIs that provide access to geospatial data. Several examples will be given to illustrate client authentication, making data requests, exporting data to standardized geospatial formats and importing data in a statistical modeling environment (R). This section will use the public APIs of OpenStreetMap (OverpassAPI), Twitter, Instagram, Mapillary, Flickr and Wheelmap.

The second section is a detailed Case study around the topic of accessibility. It intends to provide a more detailed assessment of the accessibility of popular locations based on data from Flickr, Wheelmap, Instagram, Mapillary and Foursquare. The exercise will use VGI photos and POI information as a proxy to popular locations.

All materials from the hands on session are available on GitHub for download

Workshop participants can take part using their own laptop. Please ensure that your laptop can connect to the AGILE conference WiFi and that you have appropriate permissions to install software on your laptop. Unfortunately we are not in a position to offer access to laptops or desktop computers for these sessions.

Link-VGI: PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

The Link-VGI organisers are very thankful for the inputs, recommendations and expertise of the programme committee which helped in providing peer review for the workshop paper submissions. As a courtesy we outline their names here.

  • Vyron (Byron) Antoniou, University College London, UK
  • Jamal Jokar Arsanjani, Aalborg Copenhagen University, Denmark
  • Padraig Corcoran, Cardiff University, UK
  • Georg Gartner, TU Vienna, Austria
  • Hartwig Hochmair, University of Florida, United States
  • Peter Mooney, Maynooth University, Ireland
  • Ross Purves, University of Zurich, Switzerland
  • Adam Rousell, University of Heidelberg, Germany
  • Sven Schade, Joint Research Center, Italy
  • Enrico Steiger, University of Heidelberg, Germany
  • Alexander Zipf, University of Heidelberg, Germany

Link-VGI Workshop: Supporting Institutions

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