Canadian Tech Pioneer and Father of GIS, Roger Tomlinson

This post is overdue in acknowledging the death of Roger Tomlinson. The "father of GIS" (geographic information systems) passed away February 7. Esri Canada posted an obituary that highlights Tomlinson's incredible accomplishments:

Dr. Tomlinson invented the first computerized GIS back in the ‘60s, when he developed the Canada Geographic Information System for use by the Canada Land Inventory.

Thanks to his innovation, we can now easily overlay unlimited amounts of data on dynamic, digital maps and analyze information in numerous ways previously not possible. From climate change, overpopulation, poverty, disease outbreaks and flooding, to managing power outages, emergencies and optimizing site selection, GIS is being used today in various industries to help solve virtually any location-based problem.

Dr. Tomlinson’s invention of GIS led to the development of today’s computerized mapping technology, digitizing tables and global positioning systems. As well, his work advanced mapping as a profession and established a thriving industry that employs thousands worldwide....

For a fuller story on Tomlinson's pioneering work with GIS and digital mapping as well as an overview of his life, read Globe and Mail's obituary or view a 1967 National Film Board documentary film on his work.

As my career becomes increasingly focused on geoinformatics, I, like very many others, owe a great debt to Tomlinson's contributions. As a Canadian, I'm inspired by work Tomlinson did in Canada not only in establishing a tech industry, but also for helping make geographic information accessible and useful in the lives of people worldwide.

Exploring the World of Geocaching

A couple weeks ago, I decided to start geocaching. I have always liked hiking and exploring plus I figured geocaching was an interesting way to engage with my research interest on locative technology and people's playful interactions with place via their mobile devices.

Briefly, geocaching is activity wherein average people across the world hide a box (cache) which contains a log book and possibly trinkets. The cache hider then enters the geocache's GPS coordinates and description  into an online database. The people like me try to find them the caches on their GPS device or smartphone using the location coordinates. Then the finder goes online to log the find and share their story.

There are various versions of geocaching and sites, but the most commonly used one is Geocaching,com. The site also has best introduction on the topic. 

I've now found four geocaches in three different cities and used both my mobile device and two different GPS devices (Garmin and TomTom) so I feel enough of a non-muggle (yes, they use that term as much as I hate it) to comment on it.

Applications and devices
I am in limited budget, so when I noticed that the official geocache mobile was $10, I was nonplussed. $10 is one of the most expensive mobile apps that I have encountered and it is a lot to fork out for someone just trying out geocaching.

So I found a free open-source app for Androids- c:geo. For novices, c:geo is not the simplest app to use but once one gets more familiar it becomes easier to use. Now, I like using it so much, I can't see why anyone would pay $10 for the "official" app.

The activity
I like going for walks and hiking and don't need much motivation beyond some pleasant scenery to get me going (although a good pastry at the end certainly doesn't hurt). But I thought geocaching might add a dimension of fun to a hike, engage my daughter, and possibly learn something about a location. I also thought it might make going for a walk in a dull or nondescript location more enjoyable.

So in most of these regards, geocaching is a hit with my me and my family. If you are going to go on a hike anyway, it definitely adds to one's enjoyment and is not a distraction.

My daughter enjoys the hunt for the cache when we are close, but mostly she's in it for the treasure contained within. From my small sample, this has been a bit of a bust as half our geocaches we found were empty or had essentially garbage (business cards, broken stuff, etc.).

I really like the "Earth Cache" type that I did as I learned a lot about the difference between geodes, vugs, and other cavities.  But to log it the cache, one needs to have a portable black light. I hate it when people set up such ridiculous and frankly elitist requirements to any activity (as really who owns a portable black light). So if this is any reflection of the requirements allowed for Earth Caches then this isn't really for me.

I've heard that people are competitive about the amount of geocaches they find. This element of the activity doesn't appeal to me. But I do like the ability to log one's finds and have that as a personal travel log.


It is rewarding to find a cache after a difficult search, all the while not trying to clue the muggles into what you are doing.  On our last geocache (in Peterborough, Ontario), the cops pulled up beside us and waited for us to leave. I'm not sure what trouble they thought a couple with a young kid were going to get into.

Overall
I didn't really like using a GPS device as it provides so little information beyond the location. I want to know about the context of the cache, other people's comments, and ideally background information about the area of the cache's location. So I'm not going to buy a GPS handheld device.

My smartphone app does offer this background info nicely. But with roaming costs being what they are (exorbitant), I doubt I'll do it much beyond the major metropolitan areas where my coverage is included in my existing package. For this reason, I'd like to see more geocaches in my city than is currently available.

My daughter and I enjoyed geocaching and will likely do it again (during the few months of agreeable weather we have in Ontario, of course). And as I mentioned, if I'm going on a hike/walk anyway, I may check it out to see if there is a geocache en route.

Overall, I would like more playful ways to find the cache then just plugging in coordinates and then go. I'd also like to see more information about the cache's context than seems commonly provided.

I'm new to this, however, and maybe there are solutions to my problems or workarounds? If so, please let me know.

Related activities
In researching this article. I uncovered many other activities that use locative technology to encourage physical explorations whether finding objects, (via QR codes), solving clues or puzzles to find a location, or various other games fostering playful interactions with the world.  I've compiled a list of location-based games on Delicious, but here's a good article highlighting ten GPS-related games.

These sound appealing to me and would likely be a hit with my kid, so I want to try some of these out. There are so many though. Anyone have any recommendations?

Help Making Location Based Services Relevant

I've been reviewing the recent literature related to location based services and locative media and came across an incredibly useful article for those building or refining such apps. The article, Criteria of geographic relevance: An experimental study, will be published soon in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science (but is freely available in a pre-print version). The authors, Stefano De Sabbata and Tumasch Reichenbacher are experts in geographic relevance, mobile information retrieval, and location based services.

It's worth reading their entire article, but they include a summary table that lists all the types of information relevance and ones specifically applicable to mobile, geolocative functionality. Relevance, in this sense, refers to the degree to which information returned by a digital service satisfies various user needs and desires. (Read more about information relevance on Wikipedia).

In my efforts to keep updated on location based services, I've noticed that many apps focus on the relevance criterion of proximity to the neglect of all other (possibly more pertinent) factors. De Sabbata and Reichenbacher offer an invaluable list of other factors that developers should consider for more effective and engaging user experiences. Even better, their work is based on actual user studies.

Here is their table of relevance criteria, based on the classes of: properties (of the object), geography, information, and presentation (of the end result, to the user).

Properties	Geography	Information	Presentation
topicality	spatial proximity	specificity	accessibility
appropriateness	temporal proximity	availability	clarity
coverage	spatio-temporal    proximity	accuracy	tangibility
novelty	directionality	currency	dynamism
	visibility	reliability	presentation quality
	anchor-point   proximity	verification
	hierarchy	affectiveness
	cluster	curiosity
	co-location	familiarity
	association rules	variety

For details on a particular concept, the article has useful explanations.

Although location based services are, by definition, preoccupied with location (i.e. spatial proximity) this list offers guidance on other criteria to add that would greatly improve current locative apps.

This list seems definitive to me, but if anyone has a criteria to add or refine, I'd love to hear it below.

Georeferencing

Place is no longer a brackdrop for our information seeking, creation, and sharing. As I have blogged about there are multiple location-based mobile apps. Such apps enable information to be customized based on a user’s geographic position. Various commercial applications and research projects have shown users value geographic relevance in their information seeking scenarios.

For location-based services to function, three components must be in place: 1) the ability to discern a mobile user’s location 2) the ability to discern the geographic footprint of desired resources 3) the ability to determine the geographic relevance of resources to the user's query (e.g. proximity).

Documents and texts from fiction to non-fiction are rich with geographic references whether as subject, setting, or - in all cases - the location of the publication or production. But the geographic details of most information is not explicitly stated - or if it is stated, it is not done so in a manner that is ideal for location-based services.

To make the geographic footprint (i.e. the location on Earth that a document references) explicit, georeferencing presents an optimal solution. Methods such as a keyword or title search, for instance, may not provide sufficient detail. Place names found in text may be ambiguous, antiquated, vague, overly broad, or implied (e.g. the capital of Canada). I believe that georeferencing is therefore essential for location-based services.

Georeferencing is the ability to relate geographic location to information. This may come from a textual reference to place in the body of a document or as a geospatial metadata. Georeferencing can be performed through automation or human effort by information professionals or users.

The online service Flickr offers both types and is a leading source of georeferenced data on the Web. Photographs can be automatically georeferenced through metadata captured by users' digital cameras or smartphone cameras. Additionally, Flickr users can georeference their photographs by adding a place name tag to their photograph or by using a map interface provided to plot the geographic coordinates.

Information professionals can manually georeference information resources adding relevant longitude and latitude metadata, yet this neither sufficiently scales nor does it captures people’s nuanced understandings of place. Existing commercial applications such as Foursquare, Facebook Places, and Gowalla offer a model of collaborative, social systems and interfaces that facilitate large-scale georeferencing.

So as one of my research areas, I'm wondering if such social model would work for digital information sources? This could apply not only to digital libraries or archives but also newspapers, Wikipedia, etc? Folksonomies have proven effective for generating this similar metadata? Would it work for georeferencing?

Geo-Terminology

The topic of location-aware mobile applications are certainly a growing area. Whether an application used more for fun and reviews such as Foursquare or to find nearby businesses such as the Yellow Pages app, I believe this type of technology will become increasingly ubiquitous and embedded in an increasing number of applications and online services.

My research has been examine how these applications function and are constructed. I've encountered a lot of jargon and key terms to the area that I find it useful to clear up. So I spent some time on Wikipedia (an invaluable source).

So here are a few terms that comprise or are a form of a mobile location-aware application. All definitions are for the most part from Wikipedia, unless otherwise noted. My comments are in curly parentheses {}.

Device Level

- Context awareness - "computers can both sense, and react based on their environment" {e.g. time of day, light level, noise level, location hence "location awareness}

- Geolocation - "identification of the real-world geographic location of an object, such as a cell phone or an Internet-connected computer terminal. Geolocation may refer to the practice of assessing the location, or to the actual assessed location"

Application Level

- Location-based service (LBS) - "information or entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device"

- Locative media - "media of communication functionally bound to a location. Locative media are digital media applied to real places and thus triggering real social interactions.... Many locative media projects have a social, critical or personal (memory) background"

- Local search - " specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about 'what' the site visitor is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also 'where' information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates"

- Geotargeting - "delivering different content {e.g. advertising} to that visitor based on his or her location"

- Augmented reality (AR) - "live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics" {and increasingly text-based data are being considered AR too}

User Level

- Geosocial networking - "social networking in which geographic services and capabilities such as geocoding and geotagging are used to enable additional social dynamics" {e.g. Foursquare}

- Geographic information retrieval (GIR) - "augmentation of information retrieval with geographic metadata. Information retrieval generally views documents as a collection or `bag' of words. In contrast Geographic Information Retrieval requires a small amount of semantic data to be present (namely a location or geographic feature associated with a document)"

- Geographic relevance - "relevance denotes how well a retrieved document or set of documents meets the information need of the user" {in geographic terms, relevance most often would relate to proximity of the document/object to the user, but other forms would be temporal proximity (travel time) and the visibility of desired resource}

- Geofence - "virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. A geo-fence could be dynamically generated - as in a radius around a store or point location.... When the location-aware device of a location-based service (LBS) user enters or exits a geo-fence, the device receives a generated notification" {this could be used to block users from accessing user-generated or non-sanctioned georeferenced information about that location/business}

- Geomessaging - not in Wikipedia but here's my take - user messages (either delivered via email, SMS, or application-based) to friends or themselves georeferenced to a specific space that can only be received when at that designated space

Data Level

- Hyperlocal - "Oriented around a well defined, community scale area with primary focus being directed towards the concerns of its residents.... Hyperlocal content, often referred to as hyperlocal news, is characterized by three major elements. First, it refers to entities and events that are located within a well defined, community scale area. Secondly, it is intended primarily for consumption by residents of that area. Thirdly, it is created by a resident of the location"

- Georeferencing - "establishing {an object or document} location in terms of map projections or coordinate systems"

- Geospatial metadata - "metadata that is applicable to objects that have an explicit or implicit geographic extent, in other words, are associated with some position on the surface of the globe"

- Geocoding - "finding associated geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) from other geographic data, such as street addresses, or zip codes (postal codes)"

- Geotagging - "adding geographical identification metadata to various media" {implies user-generated tags & folksonomies, per Flickr}

- Geoparsing - "assigning geographic identifiers (e.g., codes or geographic coordinates expressed as latitude-longitude) to textual words and phrases that occur in unstructured content, such as "twenty miles north east of Jalalabad".... Two primary uses of the geographic coordinates derived from unstructured content are to plot portions of the content on maps and to search the content using a map as a filter. Geoparsing goes beyond geocoding. Geocoding analyzes unambiguous structured location references, such as postal addresses and rigorously formatted numerical coordinates. Geoparsing handles ambiguous references in unstructured discourse"

- ISO 19115 - "standards for Geospatial metadata. ISO 19115 defines how to describe geographical information and associated services, including contents, spatial-temporal purchases, data quality, access and rights to use."

- GeoRSS - Wikipedia's definition was lacking, so I went to the GeoRSS website for this: "As RSS and Atom become more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds."

- Keyhole Markup Language (KML) - "XML schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within Internet-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers"

System Level

- Geographic information system (GIS) - "any system that captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data that are linked to location(s)"

- Global positioning system (GPS) - "space-based global navigation satellite system that provides reliable location and time information in all weather and at all times and anywhere on or near the Earth when and where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites"

- Local positioning system - "Unlike GPS or other global navigation satellite systems, which are positioning systems with a global coverage, local positioning systems don't use technology that has global coverage; they use local technology or technology that has local coverage. Examples of this local technology include cellular base stations, Wi-Fi access points, and broadcast towers"

- Gazetteer - "geographical dictionary or directory, an important reference for information about places and place names, used in conjunction with a map or a full atlas"

- Geo-block - Wikipedia doesn't have this term, but Michael Geist covers the topic well in his article Geo-Blocking Sites a Business Rather Than Legal Issue. Essentially, as it applies to the Internet, a geo-block identifies a user's IP address and restricts access to content if the user is not in a pre-approved zone. In contrast, geo-authentication can allow a user entry into an online system or site based on their IP location.

- Location-based advertising {similar to proximity marketing} - "advertising that uses location-tracking technology in mobile networks to target consumers with location-specific advertising on their mobile devices.

Finally two good parting concepts:

- Space vs. place - "Geographic space is the space that encircles the planet, through which biological life moves. It is differentiated from 'outer space" and 'inner space' (inside the mind). One definition of place, proposed by Tuan, is that a place comes into existence when humans give meaning to a part of the larger, undifferentiated space. Any time a location is identified or given a name, it is separated from the undefined space that surrounds it. Some places, however, have been given stronger meanings, names or definitions by society than others. These are the places that are said to have a strong 'Sense of Place'"

Geospatial Web or Geoweb - "merging of geographical (location-based) information with the abstract information that currently dominates the Internet. This would create an environment where one could search for things based on location instead of by keyword only – e.g. 'What is Here?...The geoweb also promises to make geographical information much more ubiquitous, opening geoinformation up to the mass market."