Update on USGS Research Priorities

Directions Magazine's Adena Schutzberg has an update this morning on research priorities for the USGS.

As we noted in November, the Mapping Science Committee of the National Research Council released A Research Agenda for Geographic Information Science at the United States Geological Survey which offered recommendations to the USGS for future research by the USGS Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS). Last week, Adena and colleague Joe Francica discussed some of those recommendations on their Podcast.

Today, Adena has some reaction from E. Lynn Usery, the acting director of CEGIS, including further discussion of the future of the USGS' National Map project.

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.

Study Recommends USGS Research Priorities

The National Academies Press has published a study that makes recommendations to the USGS for future research by the USGS Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS).

The study, A Research Agenda for Geographic Information Science at the United States Geological Survey, is by the Mapping Science Committee of the National Research Council.

The study makes 12 recommendations:

1. CEGIS should initially focus on research that will improve the capabilities of The National Map.
2. The three priority research areas for CEGIS should be (1) information access and dissemination, (2) integration of data from multiple sources, and (3) data models and knowledge organization systems.
3. The two priority research topics within the area of information access and dissemination should be to reinvent topographic maps in an electronic environment and to investigate user-centered design for The National Map web services.
4. The two priority research topics for CEGIS within the area of data integration should be generalization and fusion.
5. The two priority research topics in the area of data models and knowledge organization systems should be developing geographic feature ontologies and building the associated feature data models and gazetteers.
   
6. CEGIS should initially comprise six to eight Ph.D.-level scientists working in teams of at least two on the high-priority topics identified in Recommendations 3 to 5. Each team would comprise a mix of USGS scientists and visiting scientists and/or postdoctoral fellow(s) as appropriate to the topic. Their location should not be constrained to USGS facilities if the most efficient progress could be made in another setting (e.g., an academic center of excellence).
7. CEGIS should establish and/or support one to two centers of excellence in GIScience at universities with relevant GIScience focus and capabilities that address its longer-term research challenges.
   
8. CEGIS should supplement the work of its core research teams with Broad Area Announcements, Cooperative Research and Development Act agreements, and targeted contracts on high-priority research topics.
   
9. To reestablish USGS’s leadership role in GIScience, maximize efficiency, and share in the cost of addressing common challenges, CEGIS should forge connections with other federal agencies, professional societies, and private-sector firms that conduct, support, and/or promote GIScience research.
10. Because of USGS’s core role in integrating data from local sources for The National Map, CEGIS should establish collaborative activities with state and local agencies that have progressive activities in GIScience.
11. CEGIS should use specialist meetings, perhaps in conjunction with the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science winter meeting or summer assembly, to advance its state of knowledge and plans for addressing emerging research challenges.
12. To provide broad-based input, review, and critique of CEGIS plans, activities, and progress and to institutionalize CEGIS’s connection to the USGS disciplines, the National Geospatial Program Office should establish an advisory board for CEGIS that includes members from each of the USGS disciplines as well as non-USGS GIScience experts.
    

The study is available for sale on the National Academies Press website. An Executive Summary (PDF) is available for free download.