(Un)Represented Places – A Case Study of Two Sports Venues in Gelsenkirchen and Dortmund

Maps represent a host of geographical features, but places are usually not among those depicted in detail. This is despite the various functions of a map, many of which refer to places as the common context in which geographical features are used, receive meaning, and even gain identity. Using the example of two sports venues, this paper explores the ways places implicitly influence what information is represented on a map and how it is represented, even if the places themselves are not represented. The findings presented suggest that the interpretation of maps rely partly on the way we perceive places and thus highlight the need for further research related to the interpretation of maps. This way of thinking may, in the long term, help to identify better ways in which places can be represented on maps

Introduction to the second international symposium of platial information science

People ‘live’ and constitute places every day through recurrent practices and experience. Our everyday lives, however, are complex, and so are places. In contrast to abstract space, the way people experience places includes a range of aspects like physical setting, meaning, and emotional attachment. This inherent complexity requires researchers to investigate the concept of place from a variety of viewpoints. The formal representation of place – a major goal in GIScience related to place – is no exception and can only be successfully addressed if we consider geographical, psychological, anthropological, sociological, cognitive, and other perspectives. This year’s symposium brings together place-based researchers from different disciplines to discuss the current state of platial research. Therefore, this volume contains contributions from a range of fields including geography, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and cartography

Assessing the positional accuracy of perceptual landscape data: A study from Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy

Online GIS-based applications that combine mapping and public participation to collect citizens' voices on their surrounding environment are a way to collect original spatial data that do not already figure in authoritative data sets. However, these applications, relying on non-expert users, might produce spatial data of insufficient quality for the purpose for which they are collected. This article presents an approach for assessing the positional accuracy of vague landscape features, using the results from a map-based survey completed by a group of volunteers in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region of Italy. The spatial section of the survey, gathering both georeferenced data and textual information on the mapping activity, allows the assessment of whether there is a correspondence between the mapped features and the intended map locations. The findings reveal a greater accuracy among participants in completing the mapping activity relating to degraded sites than to those of beauty

280 one-opposition near-Earth asteroids recovered by the EURONEAR with the <i>Isaac Newton</i> Telescope

Context. One-opposition near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) are growing in number, and they must be recovered to prevent loss and mismatch risk, and to improve their orbits, as they are likely to be too faint for detection in shallow surveys at future apparitions. Aims. We aimed to recover more than half of the one-opposition NEAs recommended for observations by the Minor Planet Center (MPC) using the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) in soft-override mode and some fractions of available D-nights. During about 130 h in total between 2013 and 2016, we targeted 368 NEAs, among which 56 potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), observing 437 INT Wide Field Camera (WFC) fields and recovering 280 NEAs (76% of all targets). Methods. Engaging a core team of about ten students and amateurs, we used the THELI, Astrometrica, and the Find_Orb software to identify all moving objects using the blink and track-and-stack method for the faintest targets and plotting the positional uncertainty ellipse from NEODyS. Results. Most targets and recovered objects had apparent magnitudes centered around V ~ 22.8 mag, with some becoming as faint as V ~ 24 mag. One hundred and three objects (representing 28% of all targets) were recovered by EURONEAR alone by Aug. 2017. Orbital arcs were prolonged typically from a few weeks to a few years; our oldest recoveries reach 16 years. The O−C residuals for our 1854 NEA astrometric positions show that most measurements cluster closely around the origin. In addition to the recovered NEAs, 22 000 positions of about 3500 known minor planets and another 10 000 observations of about 1500 unknown objects (mostly main-belt objects) were promptly reported to the MPC by our team. Four new NEAs were discovered serendipitously in the analyzed fields and were promptly secured with the INT and other telescopes, while two more NEAs were lost due to extremely fast motion and lack of rapid follow-up time. They increase the counting to nine NEAs discovered by the EURONEAR in 2014 and 2015. Conclusions. Targeted projects to recover one-opposition NEAs are efficient in override access, especially using at least two-meter class and preferably larger field telescopes located in good sites, which appear even more efficient than the existing surveys