For the first time UNIGIS International Association was awarding the Geospatial Events Grant for active and recently graduated UNIGIS Students around the world.
Mr. Luke Clasper, who recently graduated from UNIGIS UK, was awarded a grant towards attending the VGI-Analytics 2017, Netherlands. This pre-conference workshop took place on the 9th May 2017 and was held at the AGILE (Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe) 2017 conference at Wageningen University.
The event was chaired and co-organised by Dr Peter Mooney (Maynooth University, Ireland) and focused on new opportunities and research challenges raised by Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). This included cross-linking data and platforms, data quality, fitness for purpose, and new VGI data collection, analysis, applications and editing techniques.
The keynote presentation was an excellent summation of the people and processes involved in VGI by Professor Robert Feick (University of Waterloo, Canada) and Dr Colin Robertson (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada). The remaining morning and early afternoon sessions concentrated on presentations of research into crowd sourced VGI mapping (such as OpenStreetMap) and VGI from social media.
Mr. Luke Clasper was first up in Session 1: VGI-Analytics Research Papers and presented his research into the vernacular geography of neighborhoods using VGI data captured from Twitter. His paper and presentation “Exploring vernacular perceptions of spatial entities: Using Twitter data and R for delimiting vague, informal neighbourhood units in Inner London, UK.” was based on his UNIGIS UK MSc dissertation.
Following the presentations were break-out collaborative sessions that aimed to confront some current challenges in VGI, these included; data capture, analysis, quality, ethics, legal issues and technical issues.
Luke Clasper, UNIGIS UK, The University of Salford: “The workshop was well attended, well organised and thoroughly enjoyable. It was the fourth VGI-Analytics workshop, following last year’s event in Helsinki, I for one will very much be looking forward to next year’s instalment. I would like to thank UNIGIS International Association for supporting my participation.”