nlGis: A use case in linked historic geodata

While existing Linked Datasets provide detailed representations of Cultural Heritage objects, the locations where the objects originate from is often not accurately represented. Countries, municipalities, and excavation sites are commonly represented by geospatial points, and the fact that countries and municipalities change their geometry over time is not reflected in the data. We present nlGis, a collection of existing geo-historic datasets that are now published as Linked Open Data. The datasets in nlGis contain detailed geographic information about historic regions, with an emphasis on the Netherlands. We describe the creation of this Linked Geodataset and how it can be used to enrich Cultural Heritage data. We also distill several 'lessons learned' that can guide future attempts at publishing detailed Linked Geodata in the Cultural Heritage domain

Fortune Favours the Bold: An Agent-Based Model Reveals Adaptive Advantages of Overconfidence in War

Overconfidence has long been considered a cause of war. Like other decision-making biases, overconfidence seems detrimental because it increases the frequency and costs of fighting. However, evolutionary biologists have proposed that overconfidence may also confer adaptive advantages: increasing ambition, resolve, persistence, bluffing opponents, and winning net payoffs from risky opportunities despite occasional failures. We report the results of an agent-based model of inter-state conflict, which allows us to evaluate the performance of different strategies in competition with each other. Counter-intuitively, we find that overconfident states predominate in the population at the expense of unbiased or underconfident states. Overconfident states win because: (1) they are more likely to accumulate resources from frequent attempts at conquest; (2) they are more likely to gang up on weak states, forcing victims to split their defences; and (3) when the decision threshold for attacking requires an overwhelming asymmetry of power, unbiased and underconfident states shirk many conflicts they are actually likely to win. These “adaptive advantages” of overconfidence may, via selection effects, learning, or evolved psychology, have spread and become entrenched among modern states, organizations and decision-makers. This would help to explain the frequent association of overconfidence and war, even if it no longer brings benefits today

Views to a war: systematic differences in media and military reporting of the war in Iraq

The quantitative study of violent conflict and its mechanisms has in recent years greatly benefited from the availability of detailed event data. With a number of highly visible studies both in the natural sciences and in political science using such data to shed light on the complex mechanisms underlying violent conflict, researchers have recently raised issues of systematic (reporting) biases. While many sources of bias are qualitatively known, biases in event data are usually not studied with quantitative methods. In this study we focus on a unique case - the conflict in Iraq - that is covered by two independently collected datasets: Iraq Body Count (IBC) reports of civilian casualties and Significant Action (SIGACT) military data. We systematically identify a number of key quantitative differences between the event reporting in the two datasets and demonstrate that even for subsets where both datasets are most consistent at an aggregate level, the daily time series and timing signatures of events differ significantly. This suggests that at any level of analysis the choice of dataset may substantially affect any inferences drawn, with attendant consequences for a number of recent studies of the conflict in Iraq. We further outline how the insights gained from our analysis of conflict event data have broader implications for studies using similar data on other social processes.publishe

Saving Human Lives: What Complexity Science and Information Systems can Contribute

We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do not provide a good picture of the actual system behavior, because they neglect feedback loops, instabilities and cascade effects. The complex and often counter-intuitive behavior of social systems and their macro-level collective dynamics can be better understood by means of complexity science. We highlight that a suitable system design and management can help to stop undesirable cascade effects and to enable favorable kinds of self-organization in the system. In such a way, complexity science can help to save human lives.Comment: 67 pages, 25 figures; accepted for publication in Journal of Statistical Physics [for related work see http://www.futurict.eu/

Richardson in the information age: Geographic information systems and spatial data in international studies

There is an enduring interest in how geographic features influence political interactions and outcomes, and many key factors highlighted in international relations and cross-national research vary spatially within countries. Starting with the pioneering research of Richardson, we show how geographic information systems (GIS) technology and the increasing availability of spatial data can provide new opportunities to answer old and new questions. We focus on key motivations for using spatial disaggregated data and show how such data can be used in current research, drawing on examples from the study of violent conflict. Copyright © 2012 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

Geodaten und deren Analyse in der Politikwissenschaft

Räumliche Daten und Phänomene spielen eine wachsende Rolle in der Politikwissenschaft. Durch die Entwicklung von Geografischen Informationssystemen (GIS) und Geodatensätzen werden Wissenschaftlern neue und mächtige Analysewerkzeuge an die Hand gegeben. In diesem Kapitel geben wir eine kurze Einführung in die Verwendung räumlicher Methoden für die politikwissenschaftliche Forschung. Wir beginnen mit grundlegenden Konzepten und diskutieren die Datentypen, die für die Speicherung räumlicher Daten verwendet werden. Anhand einiger Beispiele geben wir einen Einblick in verfügbare Datensätze, die in der Politikwissenschaft Verwendung gefunden haben. Wir beschreiben drei verschiedene Ansätze, wie GIS Werkzeuge und Daten eingesetzt werden können und diskutieren die Schwierigkeiten, die dabei auftreten können.publishe

Transparent Estimation of Internet Penetration from Network Observations

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) provide Internet penetration statistics, which are collected from official national sources worldwide, and they are widely used to inform policy-makers and researchers about the expansion of digital technologies. Nevertheless, these statistics are derived with methodologies, which are often opaque and inconsistent across countries. Even more, regimes may have incentives to misreport such statistics. In this work, we make a first attempt to evaluate the consistency of the ITU/OECD Internet penetration statistics with an alternative indicator of Internet penetration, which can be measured with a consistent methodology across countries and relies on public data. We compare, in particular, the ITU and OECD statistics with measurements of the used IPv4 address space across countries and find very high correlations ranging between 0.898 and 0.978 for all years between 2006 and 2010. We also observe that the level of consistency drops for less developed or less democratic countries. Besides, we show that measurements of the used IPv4 address space can serve as a more timely Internet penetration indicator with sub-national granularity, using two large developing countries as case studies