These are slides from a talk at Edinburgh EEO/AGI-Scotland seminar. The talk explores how Geographic Information Science (GIScience) can contribute to citizen science, and what citizen science can contribute to GIScience.

1. VGI and Citizen Science: what
we know and what next?
Muki Haklay @mhaklay
Extreme Citizen Science group @ucl_excites

2. Outline
• Where VGI came from? [trends]
• VGI & Citizen Science
• Where current Citizen Science came from?
[trends]
• Citizen science today:
biodiversity/conservation, volunteer
computing, volunteer thinking, civic &
community science
• GIScience for citizen science
• Citizen science for GIScience

3. Web mapping 2.0
• Changes to the web mapping caused by:
– GPS availability
– Internet (broadband) access
– Cost of storage
– Growth in smartphone use
Haklay, M., Singleton, A., and Parker, C., 2008, Web mapping 2.0: the Neogeography of the Geoweb, Geography Compass

4. 1st May 2000: GPS
selective availability switched off
• ‘In plain English, we are unscrambling the GPS
signal. It is rare that someone can press a button
and make something you already own more
valuable – but that’s exactly what’s happening
today. All the people who’ve bought a GPS
receiver for a boat or a car... will find that they are
ten times more accurate as of midnight tonight.’ Dr
Neal Lane, Assistant to the President for Science
and Technology.
http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/EOP/OSTP/html/0053_3.html

6. Broadband growth

7. Data Storage
http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte

8. Web standards
• Beyond HTML:
– 1998 – XML
– 1999 - SOAP – allowing remote operations
– 2005 – AJAX – allowing manipulation of data without
reloading a web page
• Increased use of web browsers which are capable
of running this soup.
• Example: GPX - Created to allow transfer of
location information from GPS receivers: version
1.0 from 2002 with stable version (1.1) released in
2004

9. Memory Maps

10. Wikimapia

11. Geograph.org.uk
• 12,190 users
• 4.2m images
• 82.2% coverage

14. Active mobile-broadband subscriptions, 2007-2013*

17. VGI: recap
• Gained academic attention in 2007 by Mike
Goodchild as ‘Volunteered Geographic
Information’
• Also known as user-generated geographic
content, crowdsourced geographic
information
• From annotating existing information, to
generating geographic information – much
more than OpenStreetMap

18. Citizen Science (OED 2014)
citizen science n. scientific work undertaken by
members of the general public, often in collaboration
with or under the direction of professional scientists
and scientific institutions.
citizen scientist n. (a) a scientist whose work is
characterized by a sense of responsibility to serve the
best interests of the wider community (now rare); (b)
a member of the general public who engages in
scientific work, often in collaboration with or under
the direction of professional scientists and scientific
institutions; an amateur scientist.

19. • Mary Anning (1799-
1847).
Palaeontologist
• Worked outside
official research
structures.
Citizen Science

20. Volunteer rainfall observer Rick
Grocke checks the rain gauge at
Tanami Downs cattle station in the
Northern Territory of Australia
© WMO–No. 919
© Audubon Cal.
Jennifer Jewett / USFWS
Participating in Christmas
Bird Count

21. Citizen Science 2.0
• Changes to the citizen science
caused by:
–Levels of education
–Ability to standardise
–Technology
–DIY electronics and open

22. Increased level of education
0
5
10
15
20
25
1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
UK - educational attainment for total population, 1950-
2010, age 25+ tertiary education, %

23. Increased level of education
95 99 107 116 124 132 138 146 154 159 165
1
10
100
1000
10000
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
World population and students in tertiary education,
World Bank data
Tertiary Ed World Population

24. Understanding scientific concepts
© Cambridge University Press© Sanja Gjenero (sxc.hu)

25. DIY electronics & hacking

26. A new era of citizen science
• As a result of technical and societal trends
citizen science re-emerged in the past decade
as an important part of science
• New forms, fostered by ‘citizen cyberscience’
(citizen science facilitated by the Internet)
• Types: biodiversity/conservation observations
recording; volunteer computing; volunteer
thinking; Do It Yourself (DIY) science;
community/civic science
Haklay, M., 2013, Citizen Science and Volunteered Geographic Information –
overview and typology of participation in Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge

27. Biological recording & conservation

28. iSpot: mobile collaboration
Find iSpot at http://www.ispotnature.org/

29. MySoil: mobile collaboration
Find mySoil at http://www.bgs.ac.uk/mySoil/

30. Volunteer computing
World Community Grid at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

31. Volunteer thinking
See Zooniverse projects at http://www.zooniverse.org/

32. More information at http://publiclaboratory.org
Community/Civic Science

34. Air Quality studies

35. Jerome Lewis, ExCiteS

36. VGIVGI Biological RecordingBiological Recording
Community/Civic
science
Community/Civic
science
Volunteer
computing
Volunteer
computing
DIY scienceDIY science
Volunteer ThinkingVolunteer Thinking
VGI/Citizen Science

37. GIScience for Citizen Science
• Data Quality Assurance
• Spatial Analysis methods
• Geovisualisation
• Ontologies, interoperability and standards
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Societal aspects of geographical technologies:
privacy, trust, inclusiveness, empowerment

38. Data Quality Assurance
• Crowdsourcing - the number of people that
edited the information
• Social - gatekeepers and moderators
• Geographic - broader geographic knowledge
• Domain knowledge - the knowledge domain
of the information
• Instrumental observation – technology based
calibration
• Process oriented – following a procedure

39. Thomas Koukoletsos
Spatial Analysis

40. Geovisualisation
eBird – Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Dan Pancamo

41. Interoperability & standards

42. Zooniverse – Feb 2014

43. IBM World Community Grid:
Aug 2013 survey (15,000 responses)

44. 44

45. Additional relevant areas
• Human-Computer Interaction of mobile and
desktop geographical technologies
• Distributed and Mobile geographical
technologies
• Cognitive aspects of place and their influence
on observations
• Geospatial data mining, spatial-temporal
analysis
• Geographical technologies and society:
privacy, trust, ownership, empowerment

46. Citizen Science for GIS
• Longevity of VGI data sources
• Scale
• Challenging datasets (complexity, ontology,
heterogeneity)
• Critical issues (climate change, biodiversity)
• Usability Challenges
• Opportunities for interdisciplinary
collaborations

47. Longevity of VGI
• Geographical Information Science awaken to
crowdsourcing (Volunteered Geographical
Information) in 2007
• Citizen Science can provide
datasets that go back 50 years
and more, and in digital forms
sources such as eBird (2002)
provide longitudinal analysis

48. Scale

49. Challenging datasets
• GBIF already contains over 500,000,000
records

50. Critical issues
Source: Helen Roy (CEH)

51. Usability Challenges

52. Interdisciplinary collaborations

53. Additional relevant areas
• Understanding motivation, engagement
and practices in VGI & Citizen Science
• New techniques and data sources
(camera traps, drones for conservation,
DNA geotagging?)
• Understanding spatial cognition within
the context of complex tasks

54. Summary
• Technological and societal changes enabled a
new era in citizen science
• GIScience can and should contribute to citizen
science, and citizen science can open up new
directions for GIScience

55. • Follow us:
– http://www.ucl.ac.uk/excites
– Twitter: @UCL_ExCiteS
– Blog: http://uclexcites.wordpress.com

56. Credits
Support for the research kindly provided by:
UCL Graduate School Research Fund
ESRC ‘Conserving Biodiversity That Matters: The Value of Brownfield Sites’ project
RGS/IBG Small Research Grant
UrbanBuzz: Building Sustainable Communities (HEFCE)
London Sustainability Exchange (LSx)
London 21 Sustainability Network
EPSRC Challenging Engineering Award ‘Extreme Citizen Science’
EPSRC Adaptable Suburbs project
EU FP7 EveryAware project
Google Research Awards
Amazon Web Services Education Grants
Our special thanks to the participants and the communities that work with us
And to our partners: Royal Geographical Society, ESRI, Helveta and U-Blox