Waterloo Civic Map Lab

Volunteered Drone Imagery: Challenges and constraints to the development of an open shared image repository

Peter Johnson — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 12:00:00 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of working on a new project called “Volunteered Drone Imagery: Challenges and constraints to the development of an open shared image repository”, with Dr. Britta Ricker, University of Washington-Tacoma, and Sara Harrison, a recently-graduated MES student from Waterloo.

Tags: conferences, geoweb, publications, tools, drone, hicss, oam, osm

A comparison of traditional and experiential approaches to first-year geomatics instruction

Peter Johnson — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 12:00:00 +0000

I'm currently leading a research project that looks to compare two first-year Geomatics courses (GEOG 181 and the new GEOG 187).

Tags: development, education, giscience, tools, academic, geomatics, grant, teaching

Geopatial Mobility Lab – Launched with support from CFI and ORF

Peter Johnson — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been awarded funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Ontario Research Fund (ORF). I’d like to thank both of these government funding agencies for their support of a new research and training initiative that I call the ‘Geospatial Mobility Lab’. This effort is also co-sponsored through direct contributions of equipment and services from Esri Canada and Dell Computer.

Tags: education, giscience, tools, academic, geomatics, mobile, opportunities, research, technology

ParCA team travels to Nova Scotia

Andrea Minano — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 12:00:00 +0000

From June 4th to June 18th, 2014, a team from the Partnership for Canada-Caribbean Community Climate Change Adaptation (ParCA) travelled to Shelburne County and the Region of Queens Municipality in Nova Scotia. The team was primarily composed of 4 Master’s candidates from the University of Waterloo: Shandel Brown, Saveena Patara, Maliha Majeed and Andrea Minano. Other associates from ParCA were able to attend for parts of the trip, including Dr. Carolyn Brown (University of Prince Edward Island) and Dr. Ahmed Khan (St. Mary’s University).

Tags: education, geoweb, nova scotia tourism, tools

Balloon mapping experiment

Peter Johnson — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 12:00:00 +0000

It’s no secret – I’ve got a real love for do-it-yourself (DIY) and small-scale data collection methods.

Tags: development, education, giscience, open data, tools, aerial photography, balloon, diy, gis, remote sensing, teaching

Why we don't all need to learn code

Peter Johnson — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Today I’m going to provide a counter point to my last post "Why we should all learn to code". Is it true that coding is an essential skill for undergraduates, particularly those who want to use geospatial data? To interact with technology in an advanced way (i.e., as more than a user) do you have to ‘speak the language’?

Tags: development, education, geoweb, tools, 140kit, code, geocommons, ifttt, programming

Mapping vacant lab parcels in Detroit

Peter Johnson — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to announce that a student project, started during the winter 2010 semester when I instructed Socioeconomic Applications of geographic information system (GIS) at McGill University, has recently been published in volume 23, no. 2 of the journal of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA Journal).

Tags: geoweb, tools, data, detroit, geospatial data, neogeography, open data, urisa

Géoweb Junior: A community-based geoweb implementation in rural Quebec

Peter Johnson — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:00:00 +0000

I’d like to take a moment to highlight some of the recent work that our team at McGill has been involved with as part of the Geoweb for Community Development in Rural Quebec project. One of our partners, the Corporation de développement de la Rivière Noire (CDRN) has become very involved with developing Geoweb sites.

Tags: geoweb, results, tools, education, youth

Why technology adoption constraint research is important

Peter Johnson — Tue, 10 May 2011 12:00:00 +0000

A chapter from my dissertation has been recently published in Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design. This paper, titled “Negotiating constraints to the adoption of agent-based modeling in tourism planning (PDF)” presents material from a series of interviews that I conducted with tourism planners in Nova Scotia.

Tags: publications, results, simulation modeling, tools, academic, adoption constraints, geodesign, model, planning, policy, simulation

Make your own user-contributed map with crowdmap.com

Peter Johnson — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 12:00:00 +0000

One of the most exciting Geoweb developments of 2010 has to be Crowdmap, a fully packaged, hosted, user-contributed mapping solution produced by the non-profit tech company Ushahidi. You may have heard of Ushahidi, the developers of collaborative map-making technology first used to gather reports of violence from cell phone users during the 2007 Kenyan election. This technology has since been used in many other crisis mapping situations, from the earthquake in Haiti, to the recent New York snowstorm.

Tags: development, geoweb, tools, crowdmap, neogeography, user generated content, ushahidi, vgi