The notion "digitalization" comes into vogue in many corners of information and knowledge technologies. Even politicians are aware of the power of digitalization and its impact on society. In general digitalization is not directly dealing with webmapping or location based services, although digital and web-based procedures are the key. But what else could these initiatives of digitalization mean for the mapping domain? Is there an impact on map production, geoinformation management and the way we provide and use geospatial knowledge? The aim of this contribution is to formally extend the function of cartography by the aspect of artificial knowledge expansion and therefore to highlight the basics, requirements and additional emerging methods in map production.
The notion "digitalization" comes into vogue in many corners of information and knowledge technologies. Even politicians are aware of the power of digitalization and its impact on society. In general digitalization is not directly dealing with webmapping or location based services, although digital and web-based procedures are the key. But what else could these initiatives of digitalization mean for the mapping domain? Is there an impact on map production, geoinformation management and the way we provide and use geospatial knowledge? The aim of this contribution is to formally extend the function of cartography by the aspect of artificial knowledge expansion and therefore to highlight the basics, requirements and additional emerging methods in map production.
Published in "Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Location Based Services (LBS 2021)", edited by Anahid Basiri, Georg Gartner and Haosheng Huang, LBS 2021, 24-25 November 2021, Glasgow, UK/online. ; Surveys have been one of the traditional tools to collect public opinions. However, social media are an important alternative to surveys, being a source of information easily available, in high volume and at low cost. There is plenty of literature dealing with the study of different social, political or environmental topics through social media such as Twitter. Climate change is one of these topics and has major relevance in our current society. In addition, politics is a common element of analysis in the platform. Nevertheless, there is not enough insight about the overall quantitative relevance of climate change compared with other topics such as politicians. Moreover, some of the literature focus specifically on geolocated tweets, which are a small fraction of the total posts generated. This work in progress deals with the identification and semantic analysis of geolocated posts in social media. We analyse and compare the presence of climate change with populist politicians in the platform. These political figures often have a controversial stance on climate change while enacting policies affecting millions of citizens. We aim to study how suitable is the platform for spatiotemporal analysis of public opinion on climate change, and how relevant is the topic on it compared to the presence of some populists. We also aim to provide guidance for further research based on geolocated tweets by estimating how much geolocated data is produced by which countries. More than 170 M geolocated tweets were extracted and analysed. Those tweets containing terms related to climate change in the official languages of the 14 most popular countries in the dataset, as well as the names of several politicians were filtered. Then, an analysis was performed to characterise the spatial and temporal global distribution of these posts during most of the past decade. This was compared with the dates of major events related with climate change and politics. Additionally, sentiment analysis was used to characterise the polarity of the posts. This paper presents an estimation of the relative presence of climate change in Twitter based on probably one of the largest geolocated tweets datasets existing. ; 155 ; 163 ; 9
This work is on development within the framework of the project Eureca: EUropean Region Enrichment in City Archives and collections of the University of Ghent (IDLab, CartoGIS), the Technical University of Vienna (Research Group Cartography) and several city and state archives. Eureca focuses on revealing traces (i.e. origins or influences) of European regions that have shaped the cities in which we live today and will further develop tools to explore these traces when visiting a city. Different historical, architectural, economic, political, and cultural reasons form the base of these traces, and will be used as input to disclose cultural heritage items that can be linked to specific European regions and origins. The enriched metadata that will result in this project will be further usable to perform new fundamental research and applied studies, and to facilitate the exploitation of the collections to a broader public and attract new groups of cultural heritage consumers. The specific focus of this work is on Geo-Social media (GSM) (Ostermann, 2015) as a source of information to identify these European traces of the past. The objective of this research is finding the footprint of Europeans visiting other euro-cities by determining areas of preference in a city for specific nationalities and during certain periods. The footprints represent areas of attraction for visitors in the city and the reasons for this attraction could be multiple: available services, architecture, historical/cultural hotspots, etc. Finding these modern footprints will be a base to identify the most visited cultural heritage points of interest (POIs) for specific nationalities or even cities of origin and during specific periods of the year. Finally, this will contribute to the development of location based services (LBS) that will help users to explore traces of their own region of origin in other European cities. Social media data have been used in research widely and despite their multiple limitations, they have been proven useful for geographic research in different fields. Geotagged social media provide better insights on the spatial behaviour of their users. Some of the most used media in the literature include Foursquare, Twitter or Flickr. Foursquare is the least interesting for us because of its user base and amount of data available. Twitter provides a huge amount of geotagged text for semantic analysis but Flickr's user profile is more suited for tourist behaviour analysis. Furthermore, Flickr provides a well-developed set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enable easier access to their data. The first phase of this research involved the data collection from Flickr via two of its APIs. There are several Flickr datasets openly available, nevertheless we opted for building our own collection to avoid problems related to accessibility, accuracy and temporal coverage. Metadata of each uploaded picture such as photo owner, uploading date, geolocation, etc. was retrieved. In a second process, another API will be used to obtain the user name, location (user manually-provided) and other attributes. This location attribute have to be processed because of the heterogeneity of the data format. If only city is provided, the places have to be matched to a gazetteer to determine the country. The data retrieved covered a squared area of 68 Mill. km 2 representing a huge area around the continental Europe. In order to determine the nationality of each user the first source of information is the self-reported location included in her profile. Unfortunately, this information is often missing or can be simply false. For the majority of the users, the home location has to be inferred by some kind of method. A simple method based on previous works on home determination from user's GSM data (Li & Goodchild, 2012; Bojic et al., 2015) was developed and tested. To identify a country as user's home location, all the pictures uploaded during a year in each country were considered. If the temporal difference between last and first photo was greater than 6 months, the user was labelled as local resident in that country. For comparison purposes, a second threshold of 3 months was also applied. With both thresholds, in some cases users were labelled with double home location because of being present in both cities in the same year. We are aware of some limitations of this approach. For instance, a user can visit two times the same city in the same year. Besides, those users uploading pictures between the end of one year and the beginning of the following one will not be classified in that country. The nature of the Flickr user is a limitation itself; some individuals can upload one single photo and others may contribute thousands. The method will be improved in future work by requiring a minimum of images uploaded during the chosen period. Also, it will be analysed the continuous stream of uploads during time instead of simply considering natural years. Additionally, the language of the title and tags could be used to infer the nationality. Moreover, the first information that will be taken into consideration is the self-reported home location obtained from the user's profile. This new approach will increase the number of users correctly labelled so that we can get a better differentiation between locals and tourists and between different nationalities. This will be key for our further analysis. The uploaded photos can be visualised as points in the space given that we have their geolocation. We can generate a continuous raster surface from these points using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) (Grothe & Schaab, 2009). These raster are heatmaps that represent areas of high concentration of pictures. These heatmaps represent a footprint of the visitors in the city. Thus, the areas more visited by tourists from a specific origin will be visible and also an analysis of the temporal evolution will be possible. The continuous surfaces built with KDE are very well suited for the task of determining vague areas open enough for further POIs identification in Eureca . In addition, to include areas of interest (AOIs) when dealing with open spaces like parks, squares or large buildings. Figure 1 shows examples of footprints in Vienna and Ghent. The footprints will reveal the most preferred places for specific origins. Furthermore, all the footprints will be compared through spatial analysis. Using map algebra (Tomlin, 1990), we will obtain areas of common interest for Europeans and for instance classify the areas as high, moderate or low "Euro-visitor interest". This can be applied for aggregated groups e.g. Mediterranean nations, German-speaking countries, etc. In further steps, Flickr data from the rest of the world will be collected to apply the same approach for more groups. Regarding the results already obtained, the final number of points retrieved was about 66 million and covered a period (2004–2018) representing Flickr photos from 62 countries. Initial research was done with a selection of 2 European cities and countries: Ghent (Belgium) and Vienna (Austria). Next steps will include all those countries fully retrieved from Flickr and the 10 European capitals with the highest amount of data available. Several conclusions can be drawn from the initial results. The number of photos available for each city can vary greatly; this has to be considered in terms of relative representativeness. The inclusion of the self-reported user information should improve the theoretical accuracy of the user home location determination. It could serve as some kind of ground truth to estimate precision and recall of our own classification method. Increasing the dataset with world coverage and classifying the home location of all the global users should reduce the number of ambivalent cases by applying other strategies. In sum, further work is required but this initial approach seems to be useful for establishing GSM as a valuable modern source of information to identify cultural heritage POIs/AOIs that will reveal European traces of the past within the Eureca project.
This work is on development within the framework of the project Eureca: EUropean Region Enrichment in City Archives and collections of the University of Ghent (IDLab, CartoGIS), the Technical University of Vienna (Research Group Cartography) and several city and state archives. Eureca focuses on revealing traces (i.e. origins or influences) of European regions that have shaped the cities in which we live today and will further develop tools to explore these traces when visiting a city. Different historical, architectural, economic, political, and cultural reasons form the base of these traces, and will be used as input to disclose cultural heritage items that can be linked to specific European regions and origins. The enriched metadata that will result in this project will be further usable to perform new fundamental research and applied studies, and to facilitate the exploitation of the collections to a broader public and attract new groups of cultural heritage consumers. The specific focus of this work is on Geo-Social media (GSM) (Ostermann, 2015) as a source of information to identify these European traces of the past. The objective of this research is finding the footprint of Europeans visiting other euro-cities by determining areas of preference in a city for specific nationalities and during certain periods. The footprints represent areas of attraction for visitors in the city and the reasons for this attraction could be multiple: available services, architecture, historical/cultural hotspots, etc. Finding these modern footprints will be a base to identify the most visited cultural heritage points of interest (POIs) for specific nationalities or even cities of origin and during specific periods of the year. Finally, this will contribute to the development of location based services (LBS) that will help users to explore traces of their own region of origin in other European cities. Social media data have been used in research widely and despite their multiple limitations, they have been proven useful for geographic research in different fields. Geotagged social media provide better insights on the spatial behaviour of their users. Some of the most used media in the literature include Foursquare, Twitter or Flickr. Foursquare is the least interesting for us because of its user base and amount of data available. Twitter provides a huge amount of geotagged text for semantic analysis but Flickr's user profile is more suited for tourist behaviour analysis. Furthermore, Flickr provides a well-developed set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enable easier access to their data. The first phase of this research involved the data collection from Flickr via two of its APIs. There are several Flickr datasets openly available, nevertheless we opted for building our own collection to avoid problems related to accessibility, accuracy and temporal coverage. Metadata of each uploaded picture such as photo owner, uploading date, geolocation, etc. was retrieved. In a second process, another API will be used to obtain the user name, location (user manually-provided) and other attributes. This location attribute have to be processed because of the heterogeneity of the data format. If only city is provided, the places have to be matched to a gazetteer to determine the country. The data retrieved covered a squared area of 68 Mill. km2 representing a huge area around the continental Europe. In order to determine the nationality of each user the first source of information is the self-reported location included in her profile. Unfortunately, this information is often missing or can be simply false. For the majority of the users, the home location has to be inferred by some kind of method. A simple method based on previous works on home determination from user's GSM data (Li & Goodchild, 2012; Bojic et al., 2015) was developed and tested. To identify a country as user's home location, all the pictures uploaded during a year in each country were considered. If the temporal difference between last and first photo was greater than 6 months, the user was labelled as local resident in that country. For comparison purposes, a second threshold of 3 months was also applied. With both thresholds, in some cases users were labelled with double home location because of being present in both cities in the same year. We are aware of some limitations of this approach. For instance, a user can visit two times the same city in the same year. Besides, those users uploading pictures between the end of one year and the beginning of the following one will not be classified in that country. The nature of the Flickr user is a limitation itself; some individuals can upload one single photo and others may contribute thousands. The method will be improved in future work by requiring a minimum of images uploaded during the chosen period. Also, it will be analysed the continuous stream of uploads during time instead of simply considering natural years. Additionally, the language of the title and tags could be used to infer the nationality. Moreover, the first information that will be taken into consideration is the self-reported home location obtained from the user's profile. This new approach will increase the number of users correctly labelled so that we can get a better differentiation between locals and tourists and between different nationalities. This will be key for our further analysis. The uploaded photos can be visualised as points in the space given that we have their geolocation. We can generate a continuous raster surface from these points using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) (Grothe & Schaab, 2009). These raster are heatmaps that represent areas of high concentration of pictures. These heatmaps represent a footprint of the visitors in the city. Thus, the areas more visited by tourists from a specific origin will be visible and also an analysis of the temporal evolution will be possible. The continuous surfaces built with KDE are very well suited for the task of determining vague areas open enough for further POIs identification in Eureca. In addition, to include areas of interest (AOIs) when dealing with open spaces like parks, squares or large buildings. Figure 1 shows examples of footprints in Vienna and Ghent. The footprints will reveal the most preferred places for specific origins. Furthermore, all the footprints will be compared through spatial analysis. Using map algebra (Tomlin, 1990), we will obtain areas of common interest for Europeans and for instance classify the areas as high, moderate or low "Euro-visitor interest". This can be applied for aggregated groups e.g. Mediterranean nations, German-speaking countries, etc. In further steps, Flickr data from the rest of the world will be collected to apply the same approach for more groups. Regarding the results already obtained, the final number of points retrieved was about 66 million and covered a period (2004–2018) representing Flickr photos from 62 countries. Initial research was done with a selection of 2 European cities and countries: Ghent (Belgium) and Vienna (Austria). Next steps will include all those countries fully retrieved from Flickr and the 10 European capitals with the highest amount of data available. Several conclusions can be drawn from the initial results. The number of photos available for each city can vary greatly; this has to be considered in terms of relative representativeness. The inclusion of the self-reported user information should improve the theoretical accuracy of the user home location determination. It could serve as some kind of ground truth to estimate precision and recall of our own classification method. Increasing the dataset with world coverage and classifying the home location of all the global users should reduce the number of ambivalent cases by applying other strategies. In sum, further work is required but this initial approach seems to be useful for establishing GSM as a valuable modern source of information to identify cultural heritage POIs/AOIs that will reveal European traces of the past within the Eureca project.
Why do we teach cartography? The need for cartographic education: In our day to day life, on an individual or societal level there is a continual need or even demand for geospatial information. On an individual level this need is expressed by questions like: Where am I?, How far away is my new doctor's office?, Which route should I take to get to my destination based on current traffic patterns? Other questions may include: What is the spatial extent of my land parcel? What do I have permission to build on my parcel? On a societal level questions include: What cities suffer from high unemployment? What are the most efficient spots to build a new wind farm? Where is the optimal place to build a new road without fragmenting important species habitats? To offer answers to these questions, geographic information systems (GIS) including tools and instruments have been developed. The most important communication tool to foster decision making, as part of a GIS, is the map. Reality is too complex to comprehend with the naked eye. Therefore patterns are often missed, maps and other cartographic models are an interface between humans and the reality used to abstract, symbolized, a simplify view of the world. These maps then allow us to view spatial patterns and relationships between objects in the world. The world cannot do without maps. Why? Because they tell us about spatial issues on both local and global scale that influence our lives. How? Maps are the most effective and the most efficient tools to into and overview of geographical data which help us answer spatio-temporal questions and to provide new insight. What is ongoing in our world? Trends in our domain: yesterday, today and tomorrow: Looking at the timeline of our domain, cartography, we could argue that after a long period where maps where seen as artifacts, maps are now considered to be interactive and dynamic (web) services, and in the near future we move to human centered cognitive map displays that are immersive and ubiquitous. Yesterday, the map could be considered an artifact, a static object, on paper or on a screen. The map stores the information and can no longer be changed. The user did not play a prominent role in map design. Today, with the internet, there has been a huge increase in data access and generation resulting in maps being produced and used especial to satisfy individual location-based queries such as 'Where am I right now' and 'How-do-I-get-there?' questions. Societal questions are answered by maps available via automated services accessible via dedicated portals. Today maps are no longer artifacts, but provided as a digital map services. However, tomorrow the map will yet again be different. We are able to sense and monitor the world real time and ubiquitously, including human users' spatial abilities, emotions, needs and requirements. With developments in interface design including more opportunities for 3d/4d/Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Human-Computer-Interfaces are becoming even "closer" to our human processing system. Maps will increasingly become human-centered, highly interactive, dynamic and adjustable visual displays. Purpose: What are the cartographic consequences of these developments? Required cartographic competences: The above developments have resulted in the expansion of what define the existing established cartographic method: making geospatial data and information accessible for users to foster discovery and insight into and overview of spatiotemporal data. Map design, including fundamentals such as projection, scale, generalization and symbolization, remain core to cartography. Yesterday, cartographic education was focused on how to optimally create fixed graphical representations at a defined scale constrained by the media, but with an eye for syntactical as well as graphical/aesthetical quality. Today knowledge and skills cartographers require have expanded, and they include an understanding of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) that house Big Data and Data Science, Web Services, Programming, Style Definitions, Algorithms, Semantic web and Linked Data and Interactivity and other relevant technological skills. Increasingly, more attention has also been, and will have to be, paid to use and user (requirement) analysis and usability assessment. Users will simple not use cartographic services that are not enjoyable and do not help them meet their goals. We will continue to conduct usability evaluations in new sensing and map display environments. Based on technological advances and social uptake thereof, tomorrow will yet again ask for an adaption of the cartographic education and research dealing more and more with the "human" embodied experience. Figure 1a shows the relation among the current skills and competences a cartographer needs. In the center of the triangle the map and the cartographic method. Data, Media and Users are found around. Knowledge and skills about data handling refer to selection, integration and abstraction, as well as analysis. Media skills and knowledge are about the interface, interaction, adapted design, technology and coding. Users refers to usability (enjoyment), cognition, perception, sensors (robots) and requirements. In Figure 1b the changing paradigm of the map as interface between human and reality as seen yesterday, today and tomorrow. How do we do it? Our MSc Cartography: The Erasmus Mundus Master of Science in Cartography program is characterized by its worldwide unique profile and comprehensive and in-depth cartographic lectures and lab works. All four partner universities (see involved authors) jointly developed and defined the learning outcomes after intensive cooperation and consultation. The program takes all theoretical as well as practical aspects of the broad and interdisciplinary field of cartography into account. Graduates of the program are able to meet the variety of requirements placed on a cartographer today. An obvious strength of this program is the clear research-driven orientation of selected lectures, e.g. visual analytics, web and mobile cartography and the close binding of M.Sc. topics to ongoing research projects. Students in the Cartography program learn how to develop and evaluate cartographic tools on the basis of firmly established theories and methods. The focus lays in developing and applying scientific methods and techniques to improve geo-information services for a diverse range of heterogeneous users. Another added value of the program is its educational execution in locations across Europe, a historic center of excellence in the field of cartography, integrating it within interdisciplinary fields. Excellently educated students from this program will fill the gaps not only in the cartographic research community and geosciences, but also in other related research fields that address the global challenges as defined by bodies like the United Nations or the European Union.
Why do we teach cartography? The need for cartographic education: In our day to day life, on an individual or societal level there is a continual need or even demand for geospatial information. On an individual level this need is expressed by questions like: Where am I?, How far away is my new doctor's office?, Which route should I take to get to my destination based on current traffic patterns? Other questions may include: What is the spatial extent of my land parcel? What do I have permission to build on my parcel? On a societal level questions include: What cities suffer from high unemployment? What are the most efficient spots to build a new wind farm? Where is the optimal place to build a new road without fragmenting important species habitats? To offer answers to these questions, geographic information systems (GIS) including tools and instruments have been developed. The most important communication tool to foster decision making, as part of a GIS, is the map. Reality is too complex to comprehend with the naked eye. Therefore patterns are often missed, maps and other cartographic models are an interface between humans and the reality used to abstract, symbolized, a simplify view of the world. These maps then allow us to view spatial patterns and relationships between objects in the world. The world cannot do without maps. Why? Because they tell us about spatial issues on both local and global scale that influence our lives. How? Maps are the most effective and the most efficient tools to into and overview of geographical data which help us answer spatio-temporal questions and to provide new insight. What is ongoing in our world? Trends in our domain: yesterday, today and tomorrow: Looking at the timeline of our domain, cartography, we could argue that after a long period where maps where seen as artifacts, maps are now considered to be interactive and dynamic (web) services, and in the near future we move to human centered cognitive map displays that are immersive and ubiquitous. Yesterday, the map could be considered an artifact, a static object, on paper or on a screen. The map stores the information and can no longer be changed. The user did not play a prominent role in map design. Today, with the internet, there has been a huge increase in data access and generation resulting in maps being produced and used especial to satisfy individual location-based queries such as 'Where am I right now' and 'How-do-I-get-there?' questions. Societal questions are answered by maps available via automated services accessible via dedicated portals. Today maps are no longer artifacts, but provided as a digital map services. However, tomorrow the map will yet again be different. We are able to sense and monitor the world real time and ubiquitously, including human users' spatial abilities, emotions, needs and requirements. With developments in interface design including more opportunities for 3d/4d/Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Human-Computer-Interfaces are becoming even "closer" to our human processing system. Maps will increasingly become human-centered, highly interactive, dynamic and adjustable visual displays. Purpose: What are the cartographic consequences of these developments? Required cartographic competences: The above developments have resulted in the expansion of what define the existing established cartographic method: making geospatial data and information accessible for users to foster discovery and insight into and overview of spatiotemporal data. Map design, including fundamentals such as projection, scale, generalization and symbolization, remain core to cartography. Yesterday, cartographic education was focused on how to optimally create fixed graphical representations at a defined scale constrained by the media, but with an eye for syntactical as well as graphical/aesthetical quality. Today knowledge and skills cartographers require have expanded, and they include an understanding of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) that house Big Data and Data Science, Web Services, Programming, Style Definitions, Algorithms, Semantic web and Linked Data and Interactivity and other relevant technological skills. Increasingly, more attention has also been, and will have to be, paid to use and user (requirement) analysis and usability assessment. Users will simple not use cartographic services that are not enjoyable and do not help them meet their goals. We will continue to conduct usability evaluations in new sensing and map display environments. Based on technological advances and social uptake thereof, tomorrow will yet again ask for an adaption of the cartographic education and research dealing more and more with the "human" embodied experience. Figure 1a shows the relation among the current skills and competences a cartographer needs. In the center of the triangle the map and the cartographic method. Data, Media and Users are found around. Knowledge and skills about data handling refer to selection, integration and abstraction, as well as analysis. Media skills and knowledge are about the interface, interaction, adapted design, technology and coding. Users refers to usability (enjoyment), cognition, perception, sensors (robots) and requirements. In Figure 1b the changing paradigm of the map as interface between human and reality as seen yesterday, today and tomorrow. How do we do it? Our MSc Cartography: The Erasmus Mundus Master of Science in Cartography program is characterized by its worldwide unique profile and comprehensive and in-depth cartographic lectures and lab works. All four partner universities (see involved authors) jointly developed and defined the learning outcomes after intensive cooperation and consultation. The program takes all theoretical as well as practical aspects of the broad and interdisciplinary field of cartography into account. Graduates of the program are able to meet the variety of requirements placed on a cartographer today. An obvious strength of this program is the clear research-driven orientation of selected lectures, e.g. visual analytics, web and mobile cartography and the close binding of M.Sc. topics to ongoing research projects. Students in the Cartography program learn how to develop and evaluate cartographic tools on the basis of firmly established theories and methods. The focus lays in developing and applying scientific methods and techniques to improve geo-information services for a diverse range of heterogeneous users. Another added value of the program is its educational execution in locations across Europe, a historic center of excellence in the field of cartography, integrating it within interdisciplinary fields. Excellently educated students from this program will fill the gaps not only in the cartographic research community and geosciences, but also in other related research fields that address the global challenges as defined by bodies like the United Nations or the European Union.
