A Field Guide to GIS for Non-GIS Folks

The NGO mapping organization MapAction earlier this year published a Field Guide to Humanitarian Mapping (PDF) that sets out to provide "a comprehensive manual to selecting and using free and open source GIS and other software for humanitarian operations."



MapAction, based in the UK, describes itself as "the only non-governmental organisation (NGO) with a substantial track record in field mapping for disaster emergencies." It explains its purpose this way:

Before an aid agency can respond to a disaster, their first need is for...information. Where are the affected people? Where are the relief resources? Who is doing what already?

MapAction delivers that vital information in the form of maps, created from information gathered at the disaster scene. By conveying a 'shared operational picture', our maps play a crucial role in delivering humanitarian aid to the right place, quickly.

The Field Guide to Humanitarian Mapping includes basic introductions to GIS mapping and to the use of GPS to collect data. It also offers detailed tutorials on using free and/or open source tools such as Google Earth and MapWindow to create and manage GIS data and maps for humanitarian response efforts.

Here's an Interesting Idea

Robert Kosara, at Eager Eyes, suggests that there might be a role for a "National Data Agency" to enable the government openness that is now being discussed.

This agency would be tasked with collecting data that all other agencies collect and produce, and making it available in a central place and in electronic, machine-readable form. There could and should be a reasonable data presentation on its website, perhaps even a National Data Dashboard (showing data of interest like debt, spending, jobless rate, etc.). But the bulk of data analysis would be left to third parties: analysts, journalists, citizens (and also aliens like me). Easily available data would make for more insightful reporting, more informed decisions, and endless business opportunities.

This suggestion will undoubtedly spark concerns about growing government, creating more bureaucracies, etc. But what I find most interesting about it are the possible outcomes it envisions and the culture of open data sharing that it describes.

GIS 2.0?

What should we call it when we are seeing crowd-sourcing and Creative Commons licensing in geospatial data distribution?

Case in point: the folks at Zillow have released shapefile versions of the neighborhood boundaries that they use in their geo-enabled online real estate service. Why? They say it is "to allow people to use and contribute to our growing database." In fact, they explicitly invite users to add to the collection and post those additions for eventual integration into Zillow's on-line offerings.

Zillow's Drew Myers made the announcement on the Zillow Blog. He noted the large challenge of creating boundaries for more than 7,000 neighborhoods, but made clear that Zillow hopes to gain even more knowledge from this release.

So, after all this work, why are we giving this data away for free? Here at Zillow, we’re all about transparency — we think a freely available and totally transparent nationwide data-set of neighborhoods will result in some great innovation that we’re excited to check out. Real estate is local — and neighborhoods are a great way to look at real estate on a local level. We’re particularly excited to see what companies and individual techies can come up with, who may not have the budget to license this data from other data providers.

The data are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, meaning that users are free to use and share the data, as long as Zillow is credited. And users are free to "remix" the data, provided that they publish it using the same or a compatible license.

Before you get too excited, be aware that the data is limited to major cities and is not available for all states. (why is no city in Delaware sufficiently important?!?) The data for Washington DC, for example, does not extend to the suburban neighborhoods outside of the District lines.

But that's why Zillow has made this release. They want to see this data extend and they are setting it free (with appropriate metadata, I see) to see how it grows.

(Via James Fee GIS Blog)

How Remote is Your Sensed Data?

Researchers Fabien Girardin and Josep Blat of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona are doing some interesting geospatial analysis using what is essentially "found" geodata.

In Tracing the Visitor's Eye, Girardin and Blat are using the geotagging of photo locations by tourists in the photo-sharing website flickr to populate spatial analysis models and examine how tourists interact with several major cities.

Flickr allows users to "place" their photos on maps, creating simple geodata that can be viewed and used by other applications (assuming a user has set permissions to "public," as many do). Blat and Girardin are working on several research goals with these data:

• Evaluating the potential of using people-generated geotagged information to contribute urban understanding.
• Studying how people explicitly position and disclose spatio-temporal information in order to understand their use and need of quality of location information in a urban space.

That is, can we use tourist-generated geodata to study cities? And, if so, what are the effects of variation in their dependability as geo-locators?

It is the case that flickr users vary widely in their attention to exactness when mapping their photos. The researchers are working on whether or not that variation in data quality can be overcome in analysis.

If so, there are some interesting possible applications. Urban planners might be able to determine which are the most important view-sheds in an area and which need the most protection. State and national parks managers can study what is most interesting to visitors.

Aside from heat-maps of raw tourist interest, the project includes traces based on temporal data included in the photo metadata. These allow researchers to track where and when visitors are going. That led to an interesting insight into the different approaches taken by foreign and domestic visitors to Italy, as reported in a one-page PDF summary prepared by the researchers:

For instance ... Americans follow a specific graph constituted by the nodes of Florence, Siena, Pisa, Genova and Perugia. By contrast, Italians ... are more adventurous in their exploration of the area (including reporting on visits of the Island of Elba).

If nothing else, this research illustrates the expansion of new and public sources of data and information possible with the spread of open-source tools and applications on-line. And it re-enforces the value that professional GIS folks can bring to the analysis and use of that data.