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

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

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Advancing Higher Education as a Field of Study

Where is higher education as a field of study going in this century? How will higher education program leaders design and sustain their degree programs\u27 vitality in the face of perennial challenges from inside and outside the academy? While in 1979 the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) defined standards for student affairs master\u27s level preparation, and while 2010 saw the adoption of guidelines for higher education administration and leadership preparation programs at the master\u27s degree level, there still are, however, no guidelines that address higher education leadership doctoral programs, despite increasing demands for assessment and evaluation. This book suggests that higher education administration doctoral degree guidelines are a critical next step in advancing their program quality and continuity. It offers a review of the field\u27s history, the condition of its higher education programs, developments from the student affairs specialization and its guidelines, and a multi-chapter dialogue on the benefits or disadvantages of having guidelines. At a time of urgency to prepare the next generation of higher education faculty and leaders, this book sets out the parameters for the debate about what the guidelines should cover to ensure the appropriate and effective preparation of students. It also offers a useful framework for enriching the knowledge of deans, chairs, program coordinators and faculty who are engaged in program design, assessment, and revision. It will also be of interest to policymakers, the personnel of accrediting agencies, and not least graduate students within higher education preparation programs. All the contributors to this volume have the exemplary expertise, leadership experience, and a close association with higher education guidelines and standards, and have extensively contributed to the literature on higher education.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/edu_books/1003/thumbnail.jp