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CyberGIS for Geospatial Discovery and Innovation pp 225–246Cite as

Georeferenced Social Multimedia as Volunteered Geographic Information

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Part of the book series: GeoJournal Library ((GEJL,volume 118))

Abstract

We argue that georeferenced social multimedia is really a form of volunteered geographic information. For example, community-contributed images and videos available at websites such as Flickr often indicate the location where they were acquired, and, thus, potentially contain a wealth of information about what-is-where on the surface of the Earth. The challenge is how to extract this information from these complex and noisy data, preferably in an automated fashion. We describe a novel analysis framework termed proximate sensing that makes progress towards this goal by using the visual content of georeferenced ground-level images and videos to extract and map geographically relevant information. We describe several geographic knowledge discovery contexts along with case studies where this new analysis paradigm has the potential to map phenomena not easily observable through other means, if at all.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.flickr.com.

  2. 2.

    http://www.trekearth.com.

  3. 3.

    http://www.treknature.com.

  4. 4.

    http://www.wikipedia.org.

  5. 5.

    http://www.merriam-webster.com.

  6. 6.

    https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/finder.

  7. 7.

    http://www.geograph.org.uk.

  8. 8.

    http://scenicornot.datasciencelab.co.uk/.

  9. 9.

    http://twitter.com.

  10. 10.

    http://www.facebook.com.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded in part by an National Science Foundation CAREER grant (IIS-1150115) and a US Department of Energy Early Career Scientist and Engineer/PECASE award.

The Geograph Britain and Ireland images in Fig. 2 are copyright the following users (starting at the top right and proceeding clockwise): Andrew Abbott, Richard Law, Colin Smith, and L S Wilson. The Geograph Britain and Ireland images in Fig. 10 are copyright the following users (left to right): Andy Beecroft and Gordon Hatton. All the images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The Flickr images in Fig. 8 are copyright the following users (starting at the top and proceeding clockwise): D.H. Parks, Perfect Zero, Monica’s Dad, umjanedoan, michaelz1, asmythie, Max Braun, wabatson, Monica’s Dad, MaxVT, and zenra. The images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The maps in Figs. 2 and 8 are copyright OpenStreetMap contributors. The data is made available under the Open Database License and the cartography is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Merced, CA, 95343, USA

    Shawn Newsam & Daniel Leung

Authors
  1. Shawn Newsam
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  2. Daniel Leung
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Correspondence to Shawn Newsam .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Shaowen Wang

  2. University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, USA

    Michael F. Goodchild

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Newsam, S., Leung, D. (2019). Georeferenced Social Multimedia as Volunteered Geographic Information. In: Wang, S., Goodchild, M. (eds) CyberGIS for Geospatial Discovery and Innovation. GeoJournal Library, vol 118. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1531-5_12

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