Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Josis' 10th Anniversary Special Feature, Benjamin Adams, Somayeh Dodge, Ross Purves

Journal of Spatial Information Science

No abstract provided.

Grand Challenges For The Spatial Information Community, Leye Wang, Ouri Wolfson

Journal of Spatial Information Science

The spatial information (SI) community has an opportunity to address major societal and scientific problems including public health, climate change, air pollution, transportation, and others. Beyond the significant contributions made by the SI community, more can be done by focusing the efforts of the community, and generalizing them. Focus can be achieved by an IMAGENET-like spatial information database and competition. Generalization can be achieved by solving spatio-temporal information problems in disciplines such as neuroscience, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and engineering.

Ontologies For Geospatial Information: Progress And Challenges Ahead, Christophe Claramunt

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Over the past 50 years or so the representation of spatial information within computerized systems has been widely addressed and developed in order to provide suitable data manipulation, analysis, and visualisation mechanisms. The range of applications is unlimited and nowadays impacts almost all sciences and practices. However, current conceptualisations and numerical representations of geospatial information still require the development of richer abstract models that match the complexity of spatial and temporal information. Geospatial ontologies are promising modelling alternatives that might favour the implementation and sharing of geographical information. The objective of this vision paper is to provide a short introduction …

Mining Urban Perceptions From Social Media Data, Yu Liu, Yihong Yuan, Fan Zhang

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This vision paper summaries the methods of using social media data (SMD) to measure urban perceptions. We highlight two major types of data sources (i.e., texts and imagery) and two corresponding techniques (i.e., natural language processing and computer vision). Recognizing the data quality issues of SMD, we propose three criteria for improving the reliability of SMD-based studies. In addition, integrating multi-source data is a promising approach to mitigating the data quality problems.

How Well Do We Really Know The World? Uncertainty In Giscience, Michael F. Goodchild

Journal of Spatial Information Science

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.

What Spatial Environments Mean, Thora Tenbrink

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Language is one of the most prominent means of representing human thought. Spatial cognition research has made use of this fact for decades, exploring how humans perceive and understand their spatial environments through language analysis. So far, this research has mainly focused on generic cognitive aspects underlying everyday purposes such as knowing where objects are, how they relate to each other, and how to find one's way to a familiar or unfamiliar location. However, human concepts about space can be threatened by change, as the environment changes. Across the globe, people become increasingly aware of climate-change related threats to their …

Movement Analytics For Sustainable Mobility, Harvey J. Miller

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Mobility is central to urbanity, and urbanity is central to our common future as the world's population crowds into urban areas. This is creating a global urban mobility crisis due to the unsustainability of our 20th century transportation systems for an urban world. Fortunately, the science and planning of urban mobility is transforming away from infrastructure as the solution towards a sustainable mobility paradigm that manages rather than encourages travel, diminishes mobility and accessibility inequities, and reduces the harms of mobility to people and environments. In this essay, I discuss the contributions over the past decade of movement analytics to …

Geoai: Where Machine Learning And Big Data Converge In Giscience, Wenwen Li

Journal of Spatial Information Science

In this paper GeoAI is introduced as an emergent spatial analytical framework for data-intensive GIScience. As the new fuel of geospatial research, GeoAI leverages recent breakthroughs in machine learning and advanced computing to achieve scalable processing and intelligent analysis of geospatial big data. The three-pillar view of GeoAI, its two methodological threads (data-driven and knowledge-driven), as well as their geospatial applications are highlighted. The paper concludes with discussion of remaining challenges and future research directions of GeoAI.

Spatio-Temporal Visual Analytics: A Vision For 2020s, Natalia Andrienko, Gennady Andrienko

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Visual analytics is a research discipline that is based on acknowledging the power and the necessity of the human vision, understanding, and reasoning in data analysis and problem solving. Visual analytics develops methods, analytical workflows, and software tools for analysing data of various types, particularly, spatio-temporal data, which can describe the processes going on in the environment, society, and economy. We briefly overview the achievements of the visual analytics research concerning spatio-temporal data analysis and discuss the major open problems.

Volunteered And Crowdsourced Geographic Information: The Openstreetmap Project, Michela Bertolotto, Gavin Mcardle, Bianca Schoen-Phelan

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Advancements in technology over the last two decades have changed how spatial data are created and used. In particular, in the last decade, volunteered geographic information (VGI), i.e., the crowdsourcing of geographic information, has revolutionized the spatial domain by shifting the map-making process from the hands of experts to those of any willing contributor. Started in 2004, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the pinnacle of VGI due to the large number of volunteers involved and the volume of spatial data generated. While the original objective of OSM was to create a free map of the world, its uses have shown how the …

Spatial Data Science For Sustainable Mobility, Martin Raubal

Journal of Spatial Information Science

The constant rise of urban mobility and transport has led to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions. In order to ensure livable environments for future generations and counteract climate change, it will be necessary to reduce our future CO2 footprint. Spatial data science contributes to this effort in major ways, also fuelled by recent progress regarding the availability of spatial big data, computational methods and geospatial technologies. This paper demonstrates important contributions from Spatial data science to mobility pattern analysis and prediction, context integration, and the employment of geospatial technologies for changing people's mobility behavior. Among the interdisciplinary research …

On The Semantics Of Big Earth Observation Data For Land Classification, Gilberto Camara

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This paper discusses the challenges of using big Earth observation data for land classification. The approach taken is to consider pure data-driven methods to be insufficient to represent continuous change. I argue for sound theories when working with big data. After revising existing classification schemes such as FAO's Land Cover Classification System (LCCS), I conclude that LCCS and similar proposals cannot capture the complexity of landscape dynamics. I then investigate concepts that are being used for analyzing satellite image time series; I show these concepts to be instances of events. Therefore, for continuous monitoring of land change, event recognition needs …

Data-Driven Agriculture For Rural Smallholdings, Kerry Taylor, Martin Amidy

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Spatial information science has a critical role to play in meeting the major challenges facing society in the coming decades, including feeding a population of 10 billion by 2050, addressing environmental degradation, and acting on climate change. Agriculture and agri-food value-chains, dependent on spatial information, are also central. Due to agriculture's dual role as not only a producer of food, fibre and fuel, but also as a major land, water and energy consumer, agriculture is at the centre of both the food-water-energy-environment nexus and resource security debates. The recent confluence of a number of advances in data analytics, cloud computing, …

Beyond Spatial Reasoning: Challenges For Ecological Problem Solving, Christian Freksa

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This vision piece reflects upon virtues of early computer science due to scarcity and high cost of computational resources. It critically assesses divergences between real-world problems and their computational counterparts in commonsense problem solving. The paper points out the different objectives of commonsense versus scientific approaches to problem solving. It describes how natural cognitive systems exploit space and time without explicitly representing their properties and why purely computational approaches are less efficient than their natural role models, as they depend on explicit representations. We argue for investigating spatio-temporally integrated methods to spatial problem solving. We contrast these methods to sequential …

Wayfinding And Navigation Research For Sustainable Transport, Stephan Winter

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Spatial information science contributes to the foundations of sustainable transport development. This article focuses especially on the role that research on human wayfinding and navigation plays when it comes to designing digital connectivity and autonomy in urban transport.

Trustworthy Maps, Amy L. Griffin

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Maps get used for decision making about the world's most pressing problems (e.g., climate change, refugee crises, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, pandemic disease). Although maps have historically been a trusted source of information, changes in society (e.g., lower levels of trust in decision makers) and in mapmaking technologies and practices (e.g., anyone can now make their own maps) mean that we need to spend some time thinking about how, when, and why people trust maps and mapmaking processes. This is critically important if we want stakeholders to engage constructively with the information we present in maps, because they are unlikely …

An Algorithm For The Selection Of Route Dependent Orientation Information, Heinrich Loewen, Angela Schwering

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Landmarks are important features of spatial cognition and are naturally included in human route descriptions. In the past algorithms were developed to select the most salient landmarks at decision points and automatically incorporate them in route instructions. Moreover, it was shown that human route descriptions contain a significant amount of orientation information, which support the users to orient themselves regarding known environmental information, and it was shown that orientation information support the acquisition of survey knowledge. Thus, there is a need to extend the landmarks selection to automatically select orientation information. In this work, we present an algorithm for the …

Ontology Of Core Concept Data Types For Answering Geo-Analytical Questions, Simon Scheider, Rogier Meerlo, Vedran Kasalica, Anna-Lena Lamprecht

Journal of Spatial Information Science

In geographic information systems (GIS), analysts answer questions by designing workflows that transform a certain type of data into a certain type of goal. Semantic data types help constrain the application of computational methods to those that are meaningful for such a goal. This prevents pointless computations and helps analysts design effective workflows. Yet, to date it remains unclear which types would be needed in order to ease geo-analytical tasks. The data types and formats used in GIS still allow for huge amounts of syntactically possible but nonsensical method applications. Core concepts of spatial information and related geo-semantic distinctions have …

Geospatial Privacy And Security, Grant Mckenzie, Carsten Keßler, Clio Andris

Journal of Spatial Information Science

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Ross Purves, Benjamin Adams

Journal of Spatial Information Science

No abstract provided.

Methosm: A Methodology For Computing Composite Indicators Derived From Openstreetmap Data, Dumitru Roman, Tatiana Tarasova, Javier Paniagua

Journal of Spatial Information Science

The task of computing composite indicators to define and analyze complex social, economic, political, or environmental phenomena has traditionally been the exclusive competence of statistical offices. Nowadays, the availability of increasing volumes of data and the emergence of the open data movement have enabled individuals and businesses affordable access to all kinds of datasets that can be used as valuable input to compute indicators. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a good example of this. It has been used as a baseline to compute indicators in areas where official data is scarce or difficult to access. Although the extraction and application of OSM …

Exploring The Effectiveness Of Geomasking Techniques For Protecting The Geoprivacy Of Twitter Users, Song Gao, Jinmeng Rao, Xinyi Liu, Yuhao Kang, Qunying Huang, Joseph App

Journal of Spatial Information Science

With the ubiquitous use of location-based services, large-scale individual-level location data has been widely collected through location-awareness devices. Geoprivacy concerns arise on the issues of user identity de-anonymization and location exposure. In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of geomasking techniques for protecting the geoprivacy of active Twitter users who frequently share geotagged tweets in their home and work locations. By analyzing over 38,000 geotagged tweets of 93 active Twitter users in three U.S. cities, the two-dimensional Gaussian masking technique with proper standard deviation settings is found to be more effective to protect user's location privacy while sacrificing geospatial analytical …

Identifying The Use Of A Park Based On Clusters Of Visitors' Movements From Mobile Phone Data, Roberto Pierdicca, Marina Paolanti, Raffaele Vaira, Ernesto Marcheggiani, Eva Savina Malinverni, Emanuele Frontoni

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Planning urban parks is a burdensome task, requiring knowledge of countless variables that are impossible to consider all at the same time. One of these variables is the set of people who use the parks. Despite information and communication technologies being a valuable source of data, a standardized method which enables landscape planners to use such information to design urban parks is still broadly missing. The objective of this study is to design an approach that can identify how an urban green park is used by its visitors in order to provide planners and the managing authorities with a standardized …

Privacy, Space And Time: A Survey On Privacy-Preserving Continuous Data Publishing, Manos Katsomallos, Katerina Tzompanaki, Dimitris Kotzinos

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Sensors, portable devices, and location-based services, generate massive amounts of geo-tagged, and/or location- and user-related data on a daily basis. The manipulation of such data is useful in numerous application domains, e.g., healthcare, intelligent buildings, and traffic monitoring, to name a few. A high percentage of these data carry information of users' activities and other personal details, and thus their manipulation and sharing arise concerns about the privacy of the individuals involved. To enable the secure‚Äîfrom the users' privacy perspective‚Äîdata sharing, researchers have already proposed various seminal techniques for the protection of users' privacy. However, the continuous fashion in which …

The Costs And Impacts Of Rising Food Prices Among Low-Income Households, Elaine Waxman

Journal of Food Law & Policy

The pressure of rising food prices on low-income households is often assumed to be primarily an issue for developing economies, where fluctuations in food staple prices can have dramatic consequences for food security and social and political stability. Observers often note that Americans benefit from relatively low food prices and spend far less to feed their families than their counterparts in many other parts of the world. Indeed, the average American household spent 7.6% of their household expenditures on food purchases at home in 2009, while the comparable percentage exceeded 40% of household expenditures in diverse countries such as Mexico, …

Obstacles To Dieting Behavior, Shahram Heshmat

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Despite documented short term success, dieting has a very low success rates, most dieters regain their weight back within 3-5 years. The question is why do people fail to stick to their goal for eating a healthy diet in order to lose weight? One possible answer is that people have self-control problems in the form of a present-biased preference. From a prior perspective, they want to behave relatively patiently, but as the moment of action approaches, they want to behave relatively impatiently. The essay presents some insights from behavioral economics to explain why people fail to maintain healthy behavior.

Global Food Security: In Our National Interest, David P. Lambert

Journal of Food Law & Policy

All Americans have a direct stake in the problem of global hunger, which has many dimensions. For most of us it is a profound moral issue, and we are guided by our faith to respond.

Managing Public Libraries In Palestine During The Change Age As Perceived By The Public Libraries’ Directors, Ibrahim Khader

Journal of the Arab American University مجلة الجامعة العربية الامريكية للبحوث

This study addresses the issue of managing the public libraries in Palestine in the age of technological development and economic changes at the outset of the 21st century as perceived by the public libraries directors. This descriptive study examines the libraries’ directors’ awareness of their roles during these changes regarding the future of the public libraries, and the potential practical steps to encounter these challenges. In depth interviews with twenty library directors from all over the West-Bank region in Palestine were made. As a result, the study highlighted the responsibilities and roles of the library directors in keeping up with …

The Response Of Onion Plants Allium Cepa L. To Foliar Spray With Different Concentrations Of Seaweed Extract (Algaren), Rawaa Babilie, Ossamh Al-Abdallah, Bassima Kassawat

Journal of the Arab American University مجلة الجامعة العربية الامريكية للبحوث

The experiment was carried out in the General Commission for Scientific Agricultural Research in the nursery of Al-Adaway in 2014 and 2015 seasons to study the effect of foliar spraying with seaweed extract (Algaren, Seaweeds and Seaweed Products) on local red onion growth and the yield of dry bulbs and produce of seeds. Spray treatments: (control/distilled water, 5, 10, and 15 ml/l Algaren) were applied four times during the season. The complete randomized block design was used with four replicates per treatment.

The results showed that spraying the onion plants emerged from bulblets (Resulting from seed cultivation( with Algaren extract …

The Quality Of Information Circulated Through Social Media And The Responsiveness Of Government Decision Makers In Jordan, Ali Mistarihi

Journal of the Arab American University مجلة الجامعة العربية الامريكية للبحوث

The study sought to explore the quality of the information circulated in social media platforms and the responsiveness of the government decision makers to using such platforms. Descriptive and analytical tools were utilized to handle and process the information collected from the published sources as well as using a questionnaire survey designed specifically for this study. A total of 187 public sector top-level managers in 19 Jordanian government agencies have participated in the survey. The findings suggest that, although there has been clear recognition, justification and ‎motivation among the Jordanian public sector decision makers about the quality indicators concerning the …