cfp: VGI-Analytics 2017 Workshop @ AGILE Conference Wageningen

VGI-Analytics 2017 is the 4th workshop in a series of AGILE pre-conference workshops

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and social media data have become part of our everyday lives over the past few years. Whereas in the early beginnings of crowd-sourced data the collection occurred primarily to isolated, individual platforms, contribution patterns are now beginning to be more intertwined between different platforms, both at the application level and at the user side. This means that crowd-sourcing applications nowadays begin to offer opportunities to share data between them during data collection and contribution processes, for example, by tweeting an Instagram image or by viewing a Mapillary image layer while editing OpenStreetMap data.

This advancement on the application side can lead to novel analysis methods of user contribution patterns. Recent data contribution trends show also that geographic data are beginning to be linked across different VGI and social media platforms. As an example, users started to cross-link OSM point of interests (POIs) and street features (e.g. street lamps, sidewalk information) based on Mapillary photographs, or by tagging Flickr pictures with OSM tags to facilitate automatic extraction of descriptive information for Flickr images. This cross-linkage of data between different platforms brings new opportunities and challenges, including questions of data quality and the formation of user communities across platforms. This change in contribution patterns may require different analysis techniques than for data contributed to individual data platforms. The number of VGI and social media platforms is continuously growing, providing new data sets to be analysed. A recent example is the Pokémon Go application which triggered the crowd-sourced local business review Website “Yelp” to add a Pokémon stop attribute. This attribute can reveal in which parts of a city Pokémon stops are placed and thus where Pokémon Go players explore Pokémon stops.

This workshop provides an opportunity for interested researchers to share ideas and findings on cross-platform data contributions, innovative analysis approaches, current data fusion methods, real-world applications using cross-linked data, and novel crowd-sourcing and social media platforms. It allows participants also to discuss technical questions and innovations on data access. One portion in the workshop is dedicated to a collaborative session, where break-out groups will discuss some specific aspects of cross-linked VGI data. Concurrently we plan to offer a technical hands-on session on VGI related APIs and software as well.

The Call for Papers will include a call for free open access journal paper submissions which will reviewed and considered for inclusion in a special issue of the journal Geo-spatial Information Science http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/est/gsis in late 2017.

VGI-Analytics 2017: The Organisers

The VGI-Analytics 2017 workshop will be organised and co-chaired by:

• Peter Mooney: Maynooth University, Ireland; Email: Peter.Mooney@nuim.ie
• Alexander Zipf: University of Heidelberg, Germany; Email: zipf@uni-heidelberg.de
• Jamal Jokar: Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark; Email: jja@plan.aau.dk
• Hartwig H. Hochmair: University of Florida, United States; Email: hhhochmair@ufl.edu

VGI-Analytics 2017 Workshop Topics and Themes

The VGI-Analytics 2017 workshop will discuss, but not be limited to, the following workshop topics and themes:

• Joint analysis of crowd-sourced VGI/social media data originating from different data sources
• Technical aspects of crowd-sourced data fusion
• Spatio-temporal analysis of activity patterns for individual users across multiple VGI and/or social media platforms
• Quality assessment of VGI/social media data through analysis of data from different platforms
• Analysis of cross-linked data and cross-link editing methods in VGI and social media platforms and its applications
• New sources of VGI and social media data
• VGI across different regions and cultures
• Semantic issues arising from the conflation or cross-linkage of several different sources of VGI
• Tailoring VGI for different applications

VGI-Analytics 2017: Important Dates

• Dec 21st 2016: Call for short workshop papers and full journal papers opens. This call is different to the AGILE 2017 call for short papers.
• Mar 15 2017: Call for short workshop papers and full journal papers ends. In the coming weeks we will update this website with information on how both the short workshop papers and full journal papers will be submitted.
• Apr 4 2017: Review process ends. Program committee decides on which workshop papers are accepted. The authors of these papers are notified and invited to present their work at VGI-Analytics 2017 workshop.
  The status of the submitted journal papers will also be communicated to authors (accepted/revisions required/rejected). There will be an invitation of authors of journal papers of sufficient quality to present and take part in the workshop;
• Apr 21 2017: Camera ready copies of workshop papers due; journal paper authors can prepare an abstract of their journal paper for the workshop Website (but don’t need to have their journal paper ready at that time). It should be noted that all outputs from the workshop will be openly available on the VGI-Analytics 2017 workshop website.
• May 9 2017: VGI-Analytics Workshop at AGILE 2017.
• May 26 2017: Revisions of journal paper submission due (this gives authors enough time to integrate feedback from the workshop); re-review process begins (may not be necessary for all papers)
• June 9 2017: Re-review process of journal papers ends; notification of authors
• June 30 2017: Finalized journal papers due
• September/October 2017: Special Issue Published.

VGI-Analytics 2017: A pre-conference workshop series

VGI-Analytics follows on from a very successful pre-AGILE conference workshop in Helsinki in June 2016 called Link-VGI: LINKing and analyzing Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) across different platforms. Please see the workshop web-page for LinkVGI 2016. Indeed the workshop organisers have been working together in this general research areas for several years now. In 2015 the RICH-VGI workshop (enRICHment of volunteered geographic information (VGI): Techniques, practices and current state of knowledge) was organised before AGILE 2015 in Lisbon, Portugal. An earlier pre-AGILE conference workshop ACTIVITY (Action and Interaction in Volunteered Geographic Information) was held in Leuven in May 2013 before AGILE 2013.

VGI-Analytics 2017: Workshop Timetable

The workshop will be a full day workshop. We intend to begin at 09:00 and finish at around 17:00. This will allow workshop delegates to either return back to their accommodation before the evening reception or to explore the university grounds or city of Wageningen. In the tentative outline below we have provided two options for parallel sessions in the afternoon. We aim to attract a high number of attendees and consequently we believe that we can provide the option of both sessions.

The tentative outline of the workshop is as follows below. The timings have been designed so that they work with the timetables of the other pre AGILE workshops for the purposes of coffee breaks and lunches.

VGI-Analytics 2017: Directions and Logistics

The workshop will take place on Tuesday 9th May 2017 as a pre-conference workshop at AGILE 2017 in Wageningen University, The Netherlands.

The AGILE 2017 website will contain information and directions of how to travel to Wageningen University.

REGISTRATION for the VGI-Analytics 2017 will be handled directly with your registration for the AGILE 2017 conference. This webpage will not provide a facility to register for the workshop. There will be a small registration fee for this workshop which is collected by AGILE.

Workshop WebSite: http://www.cs.nuim.ie/~pmooney/VGI-Analytics2017/