Web 2.0 Broker: A standards-based service for spatio-temporal search of crowd-sourced information

Recent trends in information technology show that citizens are increasingly willing to share information using tools provided by Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing platforms to describe events that may have social impact. This is fuelled by the proliferation of location-aware devices such as smartphones and tablets; users are able to share information in these crowdsourcing platforms directly from the field at real time, augmenting this information with its location. Afterwards, to retrieve this information, users must deal with the different search mechanisms provided by the each Web 2.0 services. This paper explores how to improve on the interoperability of Web 2.0 services by providing a single service as a unique entry to search over several Web 2.0 services in a single step. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of the Open Geospatial Consortium's OpenSearch Geospatial and Time specification as an interface for a service that searches and retrieves information available in crowdsourcing services. We present how this information is valuable in complementing other authoritative information by providing an alternative, contemporary source. We demonstrate the intrinsic interoperability of the system showing the integration of crowd-sourced data in different scenarios

Geospatial information infrastructures to address spatial needs in health: Collaboration, challenges and opportunities

Most health-related issues such as public health outbreaks and epidemiological threats are better understood from a spatial–temporal perspective and, clearly demand related geospatial datasets and services so that decision makers may jointly make informed decisions and coordinate response plans. Although current health applications support a kind of geospatial features, these are still disconnected from the wide range of geospatial services and datasets that geospatial information infrastructures may bring into health. In this paper we are questioning the hypothesis whether geospatial information infrastructures, in terms of standards-based geospatial services, technologies, and data models as operational assets already in place, can be exploited by health applications for which the geospatial dimension is of great importance. This may be certainly addressed by defining better collaboration strategies to uncover and promote geospatial assets to the health community. We discuss the value of collaboration, as well as the opportunities that geographic information infrastructures offer to address geospatial challenges in health applications

New Generation Platforms for Exploration of Crowdsourced Geo-Data

This chapter addresses two recent topics in the field of geo-information, the former more technological and the latter more scientific. On one side, there is an emerging trend of visualizing data and their changes in space and time through multidimensional geospatial clients and/or virtual globes. In the most advanced cases, these are not simply plain viewers but also allow analysis of the data by acting as “multidimensional intelligent geo-viewers”. On the other side, citizen science is providing a great momentum to the possibility of lay people taking part in scientific development. It is a new, citizen-centred paradigm which, in most cases, takes advantage of the individual and collective augmented capability of sensing the surrounding world through the sensors that we wear. The “citizen sensors” will consciously contribute to this development, either through volunteered geographic information or by being themselves an unconscious part of the data analytics, which makes use of geo-crowdsourced data to extract information in order to create a higher level understanding of natural and manmade phenomena. This chapter seeks to outline the Web technological solutions for visualizing and analyzing such data, through a summary of the current state of the art and the original applications developed by the authors

A virtual globe tool for searching and visualizing geo-referenced media resources in social networks

The current collaborative context and resource sharing that drives Web 2.0 is gaining importance within academia and industry, which is stimulating the development of new techniques for content retrieval, sharing and analysis over user-generated media content. This poses new challenges and research opportunities in spatial-based discovery media resources over varied sources, since location context is being increasingly supported in most of these social networks and services. In this paper, we present a virtual globe tool for searching and visualizing geo-referenced media resources. Our approach is based on the integration of search technologies, description languages for annotating collections of geo-referenced media resources and visualization techniques. The combination of these techniques is materialized in a virtual globe-based tool to facilitate searching and presentation of geo-referenced media resources available in different social networks.This work has been partially supported by the “España Virtual” project (ref. CENIT 2008-1030) through the Instituto Geográfico Nacional

The Online Evolution of Social Media: An Extensive Exploration of a Technological Phenomenomen and its Extended Use in Various Activities

The rise and popularity of Social media technologies has created an interactive and communicative global phenomenon that has enabled billions of users to connect to other individuals to not just Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; but also with media sharing platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. The aim of the research is to provide an overview of the evolution of online social media in order to contribute to current literature for a better understanding of this technological phenomenon. In this context, the study examine questions that help define social media and Web 2.0 applications, the functionalities, characteristics, usage, classifications, the history and development and challenges surrounding social media technologies as well as the value and impact in egovernment services. Based on a number of nationwide surveys of more than 2000 American citizens, the study explored several characteristics of social media use. The results of the quantitative analysis show that there are considerable differences in the communication activities on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram which includes the extent, purpose and classification of social media usage as well as social media users general attitudes towards the technologies. The results present the differences in the demographic groups particularly in terms of gender, age, education and income and the factors that determine the use of social media platforms. The findings revealed that there is a strong relationship between age and gender and social media technologies and that the variables have a significant impact on how social media is used for social purposes. Age and gender was also strong predictors of social media use and the future usage of the tools. The results also showed that women, the younger generation, college graduates and those with higher incomes were dominant users of social media. The findings also indicated that media sharing platforms are becoming popular, for example, respondents who used YouTube are also more likely to use Instagram, due to the rise of video and photo tools dominating social activities. Future implications of social media technologies for social networking activities are also discussed

Earth Observation Open Science and Innovation

geospatial analytics; social observatory; big earth data; open data; citizen science; open innovation; earth system science; crowdsourced geospatial data; citizen science; science in society; data scienc

Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI) 2016: Technische Universität Ilmenau, 09. - 11. März 2016; Band I

Übersicht der Teilkonferenzen Band I: • 11. Konferenz Mobilität und Digitalisierung (MMS 2016) • Automated Process und Service Management • Business Intelligence, Analytics und Big Data • Computational Mobility, Transportation and Logistics • CSCW & Social Computing • Cyber-Physische Systeme und digitale Wertschöpfungsnetzwerke • Digitalisierung und Privacy • e-Commerce und e-Business • E-Government – Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien im öffentlichen Sektor • E-Learning und Lern-Service-Engineering – Entwicklung, Einsatz und Evaluation technikgestützter Lehr-/Lernprozess