UCGIS is a partner in a $1 million grant from a new interdisciplinary NSF program to foster building an "open knowledge network" for spatial decision support technologies. The inspiration for this type of network comes from Tim Berners-Lee's (best known founder of the World-wide Web) vision for the "semantic web," which applies tags with relationships to information on the Internet, allowing computers to do basic reasoning for improving search results and answering questions. Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant all use these technologies.
Individuals from UCGIS’s leadership group are members of a team of 13 researchers and practitioners from 10 different institutions and organizations who are collectively focused on spatial decision support (SDS) systems, a systematic approach that improves access to tools for analyzing geographic data. Despite many successful applications, SDS contributions are limited by challenges in integrating information across complex organizational networks and across an array of data and tools developed for narrow (often disciplinary) applications. The project is being led by PI Sean Gordon, research faculty at Portland State University, which is a UCGIS member institution. "The proliferation of online mapping technologies has greatly increased access to and utility of these kinds of tools, and a logical next step is increasing our ability to find the appropriate data and tools for your problem and link these together for more complex analyses," says Gordon. Through engaging stakeholders in three applied case studies (the management of wildland fire, water quality, and biodiversity conservation), the interdisciplinary project team will develop and test participatory and automated methods for finding and sharing decision-relevant information using semantic web technologies.
UCGIS Delegates voted last week to elect Jeremy Mennis (Temple University) as the incoming Vice President, and Paddington Hodza (University of Wyoming) and Suzanne Wechsler (Cal State Long Beach) as Directors. Their terms will begin on July 1. Congratulations!
UCGIS also thanks its outgoing Board Members: Shashi Shekhar (University of Minnesota) is concluding his year as the past-President, and Ross Meentemeyer (North Carolina State University) and Kathleen Stewart (University of Maryland) will complete their 3-year terms as Directors.
Our Nominating Committee has completed its work for the season and has put forth these individuals to be considered for the upcoming election, listed below. Bios and short statements from all of these candidates is available at the elections 2019 page.
A big THANK YOU to these individuals who are contributing to our democratic process of shared governance!
Whatever happened to the bipartisan Geospatial Data Act (GDA) of 2017, you may be wondering? This important bill is designed to facilitate and support geospatial data development, sharing, and coordination across federal agencies and partnerships with state and local governments, towards a more robust National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). Unfortunately, the bill has yet to reach congressional floors for a vote. Back in mid-November 2017, parallel versions of a revised Geospatial Data Act of 2017 made their way to their respective committees in the Senate (S. 2128) and the House (H.R. 4395). You can find the committee assignments at the links to the bills above. Those identical bills had been modified to remove language in two places, Sections 11 and 12, that UCGIS and many other organizations and individuals had previously regarded as problematic to the pursuit of open GIS and mapping activities in academic and public sectors.
Since that time, actions have been largely behind the scenes and the bills remain on their respective congressional dockets. Further discussions and debate around data and mapping language have taken place but have yielded no changes to the text.
As a long-established information science discipline, the Geographic Information Science & Technology (GIS&T) community has key contributions to make to evolving data science curricula. This statement articulates the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science’s (UCGIS) position for the academic GIS&T community and provides recommendations and action items for the benefit of both internal and external audiences. On May 22-24, 2018, UCGIS held its annual Symposium under the theme of Frontiers of Geospatial Data Science, coordinated this year with the AutoCarto conference of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS). Drawing from discussions at that event, together with many months of internal exchanges, UCGIS offers these statements for the benefit of its member organizations as well as the broader geospatial community. The goals of this white paper and its recommendations are to 1) describe and clarify the value of incorporating geospatial knowledge, skills, and data for students, employees, and employers within the emerging field of data science; 2) highlight potential pathways and opportunities for academic geospatial scientists to establish connections with data science programs and personnel on their university campuses; and 3) initiate a national dialogue about the synergistic benefits of mutually enriching data science and geospatial science curricula.
Please find our white paper, A UCGIS Call to Action: Bringing the Geospatial Perspective to Data Science Degrees and Curricula, available here (pdf).
Papers in Cartography & Geographic Information Science, available for free (open-access) but only through Thursday, May 31, 2018. Thank you, Taylor and Francis publishers.
Xinyue Ye, Qunying Huang & Wenwen Li (2016) Integrating big social data, computing and modeling for spatial social science, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 43:5, 377-378, DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2016.1212302