Geospatial information infrastructures

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Geospatial information infrastructures (GIIs) provide the technological, semantic,organizationalandlegalstructurethatallowforthediscovery,sharing,and use of geospatial information (GI). In this chapter, we introduce the overall concept and surrounding notions such as geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial datainfrastructures(SDI).WeoutlinethehistoryofGIIsintermsoftheorganizational andtechnologicaldevelopmentsaswellasthecurrentstate-of-art,andreflectonsome of the central challenges and possible future trajectories. We focus on the tension betweenincreasedneedsforstandardizationandtheever-acceleratingtechnological changes. We conclude that GIIs evolved as a strong underpinning contribution to implementation of the Digital Earth vision. In the future, these infrastructures are challengedtobecomeflexibleandrobustenoughtoabsorbandembracetechnological transformationsandtheaccompanyingsocietalandorganizationalimplications.With this contribution, we present the reader a comprehensive overview of the field and a solid basis for reflections about future developments

Changing the rules: Applying a more economic approach to dynamic telecom markets

Traditionally, neoclassical economics has been the guiding framework in the development of legislative and regulatory rules in the telecommunication markets. The regulatory perspective has long assumed a static environment. However, telecommunication markets have evolved into extremely dynamic, innovative and technology-driven markets. At the same time, economic theory has moved well beyond simple, static concepts of neo-classical analysis. Inter alia, Schumpeterian Economics, Institutional Economics and modern Industrial Organization provide a broader framework more suitable to analyze modern telecom markets. Drawing on an extended theoretical baseline and on major industry trends, we propose a more comprehensive framework for telecom regulation - the new regulatory pentagon - based on the cornerstones competition, investment and innovation, convergence and platformization, macroeconomics and growth and, lastly, commitment and credibility

Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook

Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined framework for future case studies

Internet Utopianism and the Practical Inevitability of Law

Writing at the dawn of the digital era, John Perry Barlow proclaimed cyberspace to be a new domain of pure freedom. Addressing the nations of the world, he cautioned that their laws, which were “based on matter,” simply did not speak to conduct in the new virtual realm. As both Barlow and the cyberlaw scholars who took up his call recognized, that was not so much a statement of fact as it was an exercise in deliberate utopianism. But it has proved prescient in a way that they certainly did not intend. The “laws” that increasingly have no meaning in online environments include not only the mandates of market regulators but also the guarantees that supposedly protect the fundamental rights of internet users, including the expressive and associational freedoms whose supremacy Barlow asserted. More generally, in the networked information era, protections for fundamental human rights — both on- and offline — have begun to fail comprehensively. Cyberlaw scholarship in the Barlowian mold isn’t to blame for the worldwide erosion of protections for fundamental rights, but it also hasn’t helped as much as it might have. In this essay, adapted from a forthcoming book on the evolution of legal institutions in the information era, I identify and briefly examine three intersecting flavors of internet utopianism in cyberlegal thought that are worth reexamining. It has become increasingly apparent that functioning legal institutions have indispensable roles to play in protecting and advancing human freedom. It has also become increasingly apparent, however, that the legal institutions we need are different than the ones we have

The Next Paradigm Shift in the Mobile Ecosystem: Mobile Social Computing and the Increasing Relevance of Users

Social computing has become the paradigm for the increasingly relevant role of users in the Internet world. In this paper, it is argued that mobile social computing will eventually cause an even bigger impact in the mobile ecosystem. We are already at the beginning of the "transference" of a significant part of Internet social computing usage to the mobile domain, where users are no longer passive consumers of content andapplications, but co-creators and even innovators of them. However, mobile social computing will go one step further in the contribution to the development of the mobile ecosystem, since it will put the many situations of users' daily activities at the centre stage. To prove this case, this paper gathers available data and evidence on the patterns of mobile social computing usage and discusses user innovation and user empowerment in the framework of the current mobile ecosystem.Mobile social computing, user innovation, mobile ecosystem.

Organizing Dark Matter: W.A.G.E. as Alternative Worker Organization

Since its founding in 2008, W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) has worked to reform the economic habits of US art institutions and of the artists upon whose cultural work these institutions are dependent. Inside a decade, W.A.G.E. went from a small grassroots collective to an internationally recognized, yet lean, organization, which not only advocates for labour standards in the nonprofit art sector, but also develops practical tools to begin the work of doing better by equality in the art world. This chapter positions W.A.G.E. as an example of what Immanuel Ness terms “new forms of worker organization.” Informed by W.A.G.E.-authored texts, media coverage of W.A.G.E., and interviews with the group’s core organizer and programmer, the chapter surveys W.A.G.E.’s strategies for organizing “dark matter,” a concept that Gregory Sholette has repurposed from physics as a metaphor for the majority of artists and activities that populate the art world and uphold and subsidize its most visible and commercially successful figures. W.A.G.E. is explored in five registers: its practice of parrhesia, algorithm of fairness, strategy of certification, post-horizontalist form of organization, and platformization of labour politics. While W.A.G.E. has been tackling dilemmas specific to the nonprofit arts, its strategies hold wider relevance to confronting the challenge of organizing workers who are outside of an employment relationship, who lack access to unions, and for whom the opportunity to be self-expressive or the promise of exposure may be regarded as compensation enough