In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and recent record flooding in Bangladesh, I was reminded of the foundational role of mobile communications technology in the response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
We are fortunate here in Waterloo Region to have access to a unique high school-level program focused on geospatial technologies. The Waterloo Region District School Board offers a Geotechnology magnet program at Waterloo Collegiate Institute (WCI) high school.
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.
At long last, a team publication from the GEOIDE grant The Participatory Geoweb has been published in ACME journal.
This is a guest post by graduate student Qing (Lucy) Liu about her team’s experience at the Esri Canada App Challenge:
The ECCE App Challenge is a coding completion held by Esri Canada. Started in February 27, 2015, teams of participants were given one week to develop an innovative app using open data and Esri software. The apps to be developed should be on some aspect of government services in Canada, for any of the following themes:
As part of Geography 187: Problem Solving in Geomatics, I’ve started using Fulcrum as a tool for students to gain experience collecting in-situ field data. Fulcrum is both a mobile app (for iOS and Android) and a data management/survey design backend.
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).
Yes indeed, after one of the longest, snowiest winters in recent memory, I’m eagerly anticipating the upcoming Association of American Geographers meeting in sunny Tampa, Florida. I’m going to be presenting in two venues, first the alt.conference on Big Data where I will be discussing (quickly – like lightning) different models of government adoption of crowdsourced data. Second, I’m doing a more conventional presentation on the challenges of jurisdictionality in government adoption of the Geoweb. See a trend here?
Recently I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of a team that has been awarded a SSHRC Partnership Grant for a 5-year study of “How the Geospatial Web 2.0 is reshaping government-citizen interactions”, also called Geothink. This is an unparalleled opportunity to make a long-term impact on emerging research themes of open data, citizen digital participation, and to trace the changing nature of geospatial data creation and use.
This past winter semester I launched a new course at the University of Waterloo called "The Geoweb and Location-Based Services (PDF)". This 4th-year course introduced senior undergraduate students to the theoretical concepts and practical techniques of Web 2.0, Volunteered Geographic Information, Open Data, the Geoweb, and location-based services using mobile phones.