Vespucci Volunteered Geographic Information meet

19 December 2007, 12:13pm

On 13-14 December 2007 the Vespucci Initiative co-sponsored the first of its Specialist Meetings, on the topic of “Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)”. The meeting was organised by Prof. Mike Goodchild (one of the Vespucci founders) in Santa Barbara, California.

VGI encompasses a wide range of “bottom-up” initiatives and supporting technologies allowing ordinary “citizen scientists” to collect, share and exploit geographic information. VGI therefore is poised to become a key part of emerging SDIs, however much research, testing and analysis is necessary before the match (bottom-up to top-down) is completed satisfactorily.

The specialist meeting gathered more than 40 invited specialists from diverse affiliations, from Google, ESRI, Microsoft and TeleAtlas, to OpenStreetMap, National Geographic, USGS, Los Alamos National Labs (co-sponsors), and several universities from Europe and North America.

Specialists presented their ideas, worked in small group sessions, and debated preliminary results in plenary sessions.

Participant list, position papers, and some presentations are available at the event’s web:

http://ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/

The second Vespucci Specialist Meeting, on the topic of “GIScience in support of Virtual Globes”, is scheduled for 15-16 June 2008, in Tuscany. An open Vespucci Summer Institute on the same topic will follow (17-20 June). Further details soon, at the Vespucci web.

Source: Michael Gould
Centro de Visualización Interactiva www.cevi.uji.es
Dept. Information Systems (LSI), Universitat Jaume I, 12071 Castellón, Spain
email: gould (at) lsi.uji.es // email2: mgould (at) opengeospatial.org
Vespucci Summer Institute www.vespucci.org

www.vespucci.org

Geo: International