DC-29 - Volunteered Geographic Information

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) refers to geo-referenced data created by citizen volunteers. VGI has proliferated in recent years due to the advancement of technologies that enable the public to contribute geographic data. VGI is not only an innovative mechanism for geographic data production and sharing, but also may greatly influence GIScience and geography and its relationship to society. Despite the advantages of VGI, VGI data quality is under constant scrutiny as quality assessment is the basis for users to evaluate its fitness for using it in applications. Several general approaches have been proposed to assure VGI data quality but only a few methods have been developed to tackle VGI biases. Analytical methods that can accommodate the imperfect representativeness and biases in VGI are much needed for inferential use where the underlying phenomena of interest are inferred from a sample of VGI observations. VGI use for inference and modeling adds much value to VGI. Therefore, addressing the issue of representativeness and VGI biases is important to fulfill VGI’s potential. Privacy and security are also important issues. Although VGI has been used in many domains, more research is desirable to address the fundamental intellectual and scholarly needs that persist in the field.
PD-15 - R for Geospatial Analysis and Mapping
R is a programming language as well as a computing environment to perform a wide variety of data analysis, statistics, and visualization. One of the reasons for the popularity of R is that it embraces open, transparent scholarship and reproducible research. It is possible to combine content and code in one document, so data, analysis, and graphs are tied together into one narrative, which can be shared with others to recreate analyses and reevaluate interpretations. Different from tools like ArcGIS or QGIS that are specifically built for spatial data, GIS functionality is just one of many things R offers. And while users of dedicated GIS tools typically interact with the software via a point-and-click graphical interface, R requires command-line scripting. Many R users today rely on RStudio, an integrated development environment (IDE) that facilitates the writing of R code and comes with a series of convenient features, like integrated help, data viewer, code completion, and syntax coloring. By using R Markdown, a particular flavor of the Markdown language, RStudio also makes it particularly easy to create documents that embed and execute R code snippets within a text and to render both, static documents (like PDF), as well as interactive html pages, a feature particularly useful for exploratory GIS work and mapping.