Vision 2020: Focus on the Future. Michael F. Goodchild University of California Santa Barbara

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1 Vision 2020: Focus on the Future Michael F. Goodchild University of California Santa Barbara

2 A little context Gore, Earth in the Balance, 1992 a single portal to Earth information Fall 1997 Tom Kalil, White House Science Advisor Tom Usselman, National Academies The Gore speech of 1/31/98 Simplification the Earth as it looks no projection complications away from the paper map legacy at the edge of feasibility

3 Imagine, for example, a young child going to a Digital Earth exhibit at a local museum. After donning a head-mounted display, she sees Earth as it appears from space. Using a data glove, she zooms in, using higher and higher levels of resolution, to see continents, then regions, countries, cities, and finally individual houses, trees, and other natural and man-made objects. Having found an area of the planet she is interested in exploring, she takes the equivalent of a magic carpet ride through a 3-D visualization of the terrain.

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5 By the year 2005: Possible to assemble all relevant information from the resources of the Internet based on known location Possible for a child to learn about Earth and its infinite variety through the medium of digital technology from global to local

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8 Summary: four perspectives An immersive environment A metaphor for information organization A distributed database transparent to the user A representation of the planet's dynamics

9 Milestones 2000: Gore loses election 2001: Keyhole s Earthviewer ca 2003: NVidia 32MB graphics become standard in PCs 2005: Google acquires Keyhole, rebrands, releases as Google Earth 2005: Google releases KML-based API

10 The numbers 500x10 6 sq km 1 sq km on a typical screen approximately 1m resolution 1 byte/1m pixel 5x10 14 bytes 5x10 9 secs at 1Mbps to download >100 years Refresh 1/sec a human lifetime to view

11 Technical achievements Video refresh rates 10km to better than 1m resolution Caching LOD management degrade in periphery Hidden data structure

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15 Discrete global grid based on the Icosahedron (20 triangles, 1:4 recursive subdivision) Ross Heikes and David Randall, Colorado State University

16 What s missing? A robust visualization implementing rigorous spherical geometry or spheroidal accurate georeferencing A single portal The MOADB Dynamics, process modeling, prediction

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18 A dynamic Digital Earth Simulations of past and future conditions A library of simulation models applied to local conditions represented by data A tool with enormous educational value PCRaster demonstrations University of Utrecht, Peter Burrough

19 Volunteered geographic information (VGI) A phenomenon of the 21 st Century recent months User-generated content Collective intelligence Crowdsourcing Asserted information The empowerment of millions of private citizens largely untrained no obvious reward no guarantee of truth no authority

20 What makes this possible? Web 2.0 from downloaded content to user-generated content compare blogs, wikis Web search engines making it possible to find user-generated content Google Earth mash-ups Jane Austen Google Earth

21 Georeferencing The ability to determine location quickly and easily most people do not know their latitude and longitude what is at N, E? where is St-Dié-des-Vosges? Read coordinates from Google Earth etc. GPS

22 Dynamic geographic information Live feed to desktop, laptop, mobile phone integrated with other map data

23 Geotags Invisible codes inserted into Web text Wikipedia entries

24 Humans as sensors Sensor networks sensors that know where they are report appropriate features of environment networks of video monitors atmospheric sensors

25 Sensor networks Small, cheap devices smart dust digital dust Sensing ambient properties uploading to central site

26 The spatial web Objects that know and report where they are together with other information Servers that compile and distribute information Users who can combine data from various sources NPR audio clip

27 Three types of sensor networks Inert, fixed Carried on moving objects vehicles pedestrians asthma research Human beings 6 billion intelligent sensors informed observers rich local knowledge uplink technology broadband Internet mobile phone

28 Citizen science Networks of amateur observers possibly trained, skilled Christmas Bird Count thousands of volunteer participants protocols Project GLOBE an international network of school children reporting environmental conditions central integration and redistribution

29 Participant populations Open to all Wikimapia, Flickr Trained or skilled volunteers Christmas Bird Count School children GLOBE Vehicle fleets Inrix Farmers precision agriculture Reversing the traditional top-down flow

30 Early warning Recent disasters Indian Ocean tsunami Hurricane Katrina Breakdown of technology no power no computers no Internet connections Delays in acquiring imagery from satellites Human observers in the impacted area

31 Andrew Smith, MapAction,

32 Why do people do this? Self-promotion exhibitionism retaining ownership of contributed data Altruism a belief that everything on the Web can be found and will be used to good effect A desire to fill gaps in available data especially in areas where data are not available or where access is denied for security Sharing with friends, relatives but accessible by all

33 Authority and assertion Traditional mapping to high quality authoritative Type I VGI = Type III Potential for subversion Soviet mapping compare spam, viruses, attacks The Wikipedia process anyone can edit reviewed by volunteers crowdsourcing

34 The digital divide VGI implies connectivity preferably broadband for both uplink and downlink Roman alphabet dominant problems with diacriticals

35 The value of VGI A significant contribution to geography enhancing our knowledge of the Earth local focus engaging citizens Many unresolved questions trust preservation social psychology