Deep in the Karst: Foundations for a Career in Geography

In the last lines of his poem “In Praise of Limestone”, W.H. Auden wrote, “[W]hen I try to imagine a faultless love or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape”. When I was 12, my family moved to two acres of land underlain by Devonian limestone in Paignton, county of Devon, southwest England. At age 15, I began exploring the local caves – small, tight, but beautifully decorated. Later, studying physics at Cambridge, I found the University’s caving club and spent many happy weekends in and under the limestone areas of Britain. To quote Auden’s opening line in that poem, “If there is one landscape that we...are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly because it dissolves in water”. It was this property of limestone – the dissolution of it – that led me to complete a PhD in karst geomorphology at McMaster University (Canada) under the direction of Derek Ford, and later led to years of exploring caves in West Virginia, Tennessee, and the Canadian Rockies, and ultimately to a 43-year career as a professional geographer. But, it was only recently, and especially now in retirement, that I began to fully understand why caves, and geography as a discipline, have always held such a deep fascination for me

How well do we really know the world? Uncertainty in GIScience

There are many reasons why geospatial data are not geography, but merely representations of it. Thus geospatial data will always leave their user uncertain about the true nature of the world. Over the past three decades uncertainty has become the focus of significant research in GIScience. This paper reviews the reasons for uncertainty, its various dimensions from measurement to modeling, visualization, and propagation. The later sections of the paper explore the implications of current trends, specifically data science, new data sources, and replicability, and the new questions these are posing for GIScience research in the coming years

Twenty years of progress: GIScience in 2010

It is 20 years since the term “geographic information science” was suggested to encompass the set of fundamental research issues that surround GIS. Two decades of GIScience have produced a range of accomplishments, in an expanding literature of research results as well as in the infrastructure of research. Several themes are suggested for future research, based both on gaps in what has been accomplished thus far, and on technology trends that will themselves raise research questions

Citizens as Voluntary Sensors: Spatial Data Infrastructure in the World of Web 2.0

Much progress has been made in the past two decades, and increasingly since the popularizing of the Internet and the advent of the Web, in exploiting new technologies in support of the dissemination of geographic information. Data warehouses, spatial data libraries, and geoportals have proliferated, and today’s users of geographic information have a wealth of potential sources that can be searched for suitable data sets. Standards have been established, issues of syntactic interoperability have been largely addressed, and rich descriptions are available in metadata to allow the suitability of a given data set to be assessed. Table digitizers used to be an essential asset for any spatial data center in the days when most sources of geographic information were in the form of paper maps, and skill in digitizing was a major part of any introduction to geographic information systems (GIS). Today, however, users rely heavily on digital sources, and virtually all digitizing is heads-up on-screen

Generating Geospatial Footprints For Geoparsed Text From Crowdsourced Platial Data

The research paper reports on the generation of geospatial footprints from geoparsed text associated with geocrowdsourced platial data collected and stored in the George Mason University Geocrowdsourcing Testbed (GMU-GcT). The GMU-GcT facilitates study of social dynamics, quality assessment, data contribution patterns, and position validation for geocrowdsourced geo data, with a primary purpose of mapping transient obstacles and navigation hazards in a dynamic urban environment. This paper reports on the automated generation of spatial footprints using open-source software, and discusses the role of automated spatial footprints in quality assessment for automated position validation. A detailed, local gazetteer is used to store placenames and placename variants including abbreviated, slang, former, and jargon-based instances. Obstacle reports containing location descriptions are geoparsed and processed with the help of the GMU-GcT gazetteer to generate geospatial footprints, which are used in a quality assessment process to validate the position of obstacle reports. Continuing research with the GMU-GcT has produced fifteen characteristic footprints types, which are generated and grouped into simple, complex, and ambiguous categories. The opensource tools used for generating these footprints are MapBox, MapBox.js, TURF.js, jQuery, and Bootstrap

Mapeamento dinâmico e colaborativo de alagamentos na cidade de São Paulo

A tendência de utilização de dados voluntários e colaborativos em contextos de desastres naturais é crescente. Esse fato aliado aos cenários de alagamentos que ocorrem na cidade de São Paulo traz a possibilidade de exploração sobre o modo voluntário e colaborativo de geração e transmissão da informação geográfica de forma dinâmica. E estas são proporcionadas por tecnologias acessíveis à população, como o GPS (Global Positioning System) embarcado em celulares e a internet. O presente artigo tem como objetivo a proposta de um esquema conceitual para um sistema dinâmico e colaborativo de mapeamento dos pontos alagados, cuja fonte dos dados advém das pessoas equipadas com aparelhos celulares que permitem a sua localização. Os resultados apresentados correspondem aos esquemas conceituais do sistema, bem como ao protótipo "Pontos de Alagamento" - mapa disponibilizado via web com os pontos de alagamento da cidade, fornecidos no momento da ocorrência do evento por pessoas comuns. O protótipo foi desenvolvido por meio da plataforma livre e de código aberto - Crowdmap/Ushahidi. O sistema foi avaliado através de um questionário respondido por usuários, os quais opinaram sobre a viabilidade do mesmo, bem como os ajustes que devem ser realizados para o uso efetivo da população

Self-efficacy and approaches to learning mathematics among engineering students : empirical evidence for potential causal relations

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