Call for Papers on “Urban Geoinformatics”

We are currently guest-editing a special issue on “urban geoinformatics” in the Taylor & Francis journal “Geo-Spatial Information Science”. On this occasion, we’d like to encourage you to submit your crowdsourcing-related work emphasizing urban issues:

Title: Crowdsourcing for Urban Geoinformatics

Deadline: 30 October 2017

Guest editors:

Hongchao Fan, Wuhan University, (hongchao.fan@whu.edu.cn)
João Porto de Albuquerque, University of Warwick, (J.Porto@warwick.ac.uk)
René Westerholt, Heidelberg University, (westerholt@uni-heidelberg.de)
Alexander Zipf, Heidelberg University, (zipf@uni-heidelberg.de)
Bernd Resch, University of Salzburg, (bernd.resch@sbg.ac.at)

Background:

Modern mobile devices are pervasively equipped with embedded sensors and cameras, and allow the positioning of media contents in geographic space. In combination with Web 2.0 technologies, this has led to the crowdsourcing approach, which in turn has become an important data acquisition paradigm. It is now possible to collect large amounts of geospatial data in a timely fashion and at low costs, especially in urban areas that feature vast numbers of contributors. Crowdsourcing thus opens up new possibilities for the disclosure of social processes, and for the coping of a range of societal and environmental issues related to urban conurbations. For instance, crowdsourcing allows the integration of user-generated information into urban planning and management workflows—and is thus a crucial step towards the design of smarter and more sustainable cities. However, at the same time, crowdsourcing brings up new issues to the research agendas: a) huge amounts of data need to be processed, b) more thorough interdisciplinary collaboration is needed, and c) a general lack of theorizing on crowdsourced geodata and underlying related processes. Further, researchers as well as practitioners are often sceptical about the suitability of crowdsourced data. This is mostly being caused by potential quality issues, heterogeneous data characteristics, lacks of user credibility, semantic ambiguities, and potential positional inaccuracies, among others.

Call for Papers:

In order to address the outlined gaps, we call for the submission of papers on the analysis and application of crowdsourced geographic data, with a specific emphasis on urban research and issues. We welcome contributions on the following topics:

• Reviews of the state-of-the-art in using crowdsourced geographic information in urban research, planning, and management.
• Applications and empirical case studies that investigate urban issues by using crowdsourced geographic data (e.g., OSM, social media data)
• Supplementation of involuntary/authoritative urban datasets with crowdsourced geographic data.
• Extraction of 3D information from crowdsourced geographic data (e.g., from Kinect data, OSM data).
• The analysis of human behaviours for emergency (disaster) management, tourism, or urban planning and management.
• Quality assessment for crowdsourcing geographic data.
• (Further topics are welcome if they fit the overall theme.)