In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Actually you could already, but it's now easier than ever: the omnipresent "Follow Slashgeo" and "Like Slashgeo" buttons suddenly appeared top right of Slashgeo's website. Until further notice, you won't generally see content on Slashgeo's Twitter and Facebook feeds that isn't already published on this site. The objective is rather simple, making it easy for you to get geospatial news if you use one of those social networks.

According to Google Feedburner, there's currently 9,412 people subscribed to our news in RSS, but you can also get the same news from our Twitter feed and Facebook page. If interested, follow the white rabbit (or the links top right). Anyone interested in contributing to Slashgeo's Facebook page (e.g. its look, content)? Let me know!

That's the name of a story discussed over Slashdot, Geomapping Racism With Twitter.

Their summary: "Megan Garber writes that in the age of the quantified self, biases are just one more thing that can be measured, analyzed, and publicized. The day after Barack Obama won a second term as president of the United States, a group of geography academics took advantage of the fact that many tweets are geocoded to search Twitter for racism-revealing terms that appeared in the context of tweets that mentioned 'Obama,' 're-elected,' or 'won,' sorting the tweets according to the state they were sent from and comparing the racist tweets to the total number of geocoded tweets coming from that state during the same time period. Their findings? Alabama and Mississippi have the highest measures followed closely by Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee forming a fairly distinctive cluster in the southeast. Beyond that cluster North Dakota and Utah both had relatively high scores (3.5 each), as did Missouri, Oregon, and Minnesota. 'These findings support the idea that there are some fairly strong clustering of hate tweets centered in southeastern U.S. which has a much higher rate than the national average,' writes Matthew Zook. 'But lest anyone elsewhere become too complacent, the unfortunate fact is that most states are not immune from this kind of activity. Racist behavior, particularly directed at African Americans in the U.S., is all too easy to find both offline and in information space.'"

In another interesting project to come out of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis the language of tweets in London has been mapped. To obtain the data used in the project they "captured tweets sent using GPS-enabled devices and put them through Google’s Chromium Compact Language Detector, which identified the language used".

It makes for quite an interesting visualisation. Examine the map here.

An in-depth review entitled 'Crowdsourcing, citizen sensing and Sensor Web technologies for public and environmental health surveillance and crisis management: trends, OGC standards and application examples' has just been published in International Journal of Health Geographics (http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/10/1/67/abstract). This state-of-the-art review was written by nine world-class experts in the field from a number of distinguished institutions from around the world such as ISPRS, DERI, MIT, etc. And best of all it is Open Access, meaning the full text is free for anyone to download. Below is the abstract and link to download the paper:

Abstract: 'Wikification of GIS by the masses' is a phrase-term first coined by Kamel Boulos in 2005, two years earlier than Goodchild's term 'Volunteered Geographic Information'. Six years later (2005-2011), OpenStreetMap and Google Earth (GE) are now full-fledged, crowdsourced 'Wikipedias of the Earth' par excellence, with millions of users contributing their own layers to GE, attaching photos, videos, notes and even 3-D (three dimensional) models to locations in GE. From using Twitter in participatory sensing and bicycle-mounted sensors in pervasive environmental sensing, to creating a 100,000-sensor geo-mashup using Semantic Web technology, to the 3-D visualisation of indoor and outdoor surveillance data in real-time and the development of next-generation, collaborative natural user interfaces that will power the spatially-enabled public health and emergency situation rooms of the future, where sensor data and citizen reports can be triaged and acted upon in real-time by distributed teams of professionals, this paper offers a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of the overlapping domains of the Sensor Web, citizen sensing and 'human-in-the-loop sensing' in the era of the Mobile and Social Web, and the roles these domains can play in environmental and public health surveillance and crisis/disaster informatics. We provide an in-depth review of the key issues and trends in these areas, the challenges faced when reasoning and making decisions with real-time crowdsourced data (such as issues of information overload, "noise", misinformation, bias and trust), the core technologies and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards involved (Sensor Web Enablement and Open GeoSMS), as well as a few outstanding project implementation examples from around the world.

Download the full paper from: http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/pdf/1476-072X-10-67.pdf

Via O'Reilly two days ago and yesterday with an article, I learned about the 1.0 release of the ThinkUp App.

O'Reilly describes it as a tool that "enables users to archive, search and export their Twitter, Facebook and Google+ history — both posts and post replies. It also allows users to see their network activity, including new followers, and to map that information. Originally created by Gina Trapani, ThinkUp is free and open source, and will run on a user's own web server."

​Here's how it's introduced on the official ThinkUp site: "ThinkUp is a free, open source web application that captures all your activity on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. With ThinkUp, you can store your social activity in a database that you control, making it easy to search, sort, analyze, publish and display activity from your network. All you need is a web server that can run a PHP application."

Installation and configuration will probably require at least 30 minutes and you need minimal knowledge to configure the web server. In other words, it's not a tool that anyone can set up. But it's certainly valuable to anyone interested in understanding, mining the data, and mapping your social network activities. In bonus, you get an archive of your data. For a version 1.0, ThinkUp already does a lot. Here's the 5-minutes video that explains what is ThinkUp.

I used to share the most interesting - yes that's subjective - Directions Mag articles once every month or two. From now on, I'll try to integrate them in the pseudo-weekly "batch mode" edition instead. You'll then get those articles quicker. Here's the recent DM articles for the past month.

• Here's nine elements of geocoding accuracy and why it pays to be accurate 
• Shared a month ago, here's a review of MapInfo Professional Version 11.0, which was released last Summer
• Here's an aggregation of links, serving as a Recap of News from the 2011 GEOINT Symposium, held in Texas in October where 4,400 geospatial intelligence professionals convened, and here's an article on the growth predictions for geospatial intelligence
• Even if the tips aren't surprising, here's Five Ways to Make Your Geospatial Cover Letter and Resume Stand Out
• Here's a short article, but with a screenshot that explains it all, named Visualizing Crime - A “Data Rose” Blooms
• Here's an analysis of how geospatial companies are using Twitter
• Here's an Introduction to the Second International Workshop on 3D Cadastres
• Here's an article named Virtual City: a Cost-effective Approach to Information Sharing for More Secure Borders

We've been slowly improving the site since our migration to Drupal last August. While most of the improvements are invisible to our users, it's not the case with this morning's update! At the bottom of every geonews, polls and geospatial-related press releases, you are now able to directly share the content via Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn and Delicious. There are plenty other sharing services I could enable, if you'd like yours activated, just let us know in the comments below.

While we're at it, let's remember Slashgeo.org is a site built and maintained for you, we're a small team of volunteers under the umbrella of a registered non-profit organization: if you have any suggestions on improving your experience with the site, just let us know!

A colleague sent me the link to Wired's article named Google Maps Mashup Documents Libyan Protests. Here's a direct link to the map. Libya was also one of the countries getting an high resolution imagery update in Google Maps a month ago.

From the map's information: "This map has been created by compiling reports from trusted accounts on Twitter. Nonetheless, these reports are in general unconfirmed. This information should be considered in the context of there being absolutely no independent media in Libya at this time. This map is not automatically produced. Each posting is considered before it is mapped. These considerations have evolved over time as conditions on the ground have changed."

It's Friday! Here's the geonews that haven't made it into an individual story, in batch mode.

In the open source/open data front:

• The OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition version 2.2. was released
• Automated ground control points (GCP) collection is coming to QGIS. There's also an offline editing plugin coming for QGIS. And another welcomed improvement, new class breaks for graduated symbols in QGIS
• Here's tips on upgrading / backuping PostGIS databases
• The UK Ordnance Survey clarified what you can do with their open data.
• Slashdot discussed a story about CycleStreets.net for the U.K., hopefully someone was quick enough to mention OpenCycleMap.org that we mentioned in the past.

In the miscellanous category:

• Remember we when mentioned Autodesk's Project Butterfly? It's now announced as and renamed to AutoCAD WS: a web application that allows you to view, edit, and share drawings (.dwg) through a web browser or a mobile device.
• GeoCommons got overhauled. Finder! and Maker! disapeered for the sake of a new interface. It also now supports the time dimension visualizations.
• Microsoft mentioned the TweetHeat Map App: "helping users visualize the [Twitter] public response/feeling towards a product, event or really any topic."
• Google has an entry on Liquid Galaxy, eight 55-inches LCD screens showing Google Earth
• TMR links to an article on GPS reception myths and misconceptions
• Mapperz discusses TripGeo, offering directions with video StreetView
• The GeoNames Ontology version 2.2 has been released
• India's Bhuvan, their virtual globe, has been recently improved
• There will be 3 new UK commercial EO satellites planned for 2013, along with a new commercial earth observation company

In the maps category:

• TMR offers an entry named Google Maps Errors and Disappearing Cities
  
• TMR also offers a Roundup of iPhone and iPad Map Apps
• Ogle Earth warns us, the newly available Chinese iPhone 4 comes with a crippled Maps app, there's also a second entry on the same topic
• Kurt details his difficulties encountered to access USGS Topo Maps
• En entry on a New Map Offering a Global View of Health-Sapping Air Pollution
• The FGT blog has an entry on BBC's Dimensions website, showing how big things are relative to one another
• FTG also tells us how to embed a QR Position Code Losslessly Into A Geotagged Picture With QRStamper

As you know, with the website migration and my attendance at FOSS4G, there haven't been a 'Friday geonews' batch mode for a while. Well, there it is!

In the LBS category:

• A Slashdot discussion named "Burglary Ring Used Facebook Places To Find Targets"
• O'Reilly discusses local ads, check-ins and place pages
• There's a new Twitter's Tweet With Your Location feature
• If you wonder, RFID is still not secure: "New German Government ID Hacked By CCC"

In the GPS category: