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Advances in geospatial technologies over recent years have marked dramatic changes in traditional cartographic practices and conventional geographic information systems (GIS). Scholars in GIScience and digital geographies commonly argue that, compared to GIS, the geospatial web (geoweb) offers improved opportunities for Indigenous communities to make their own maps, contribute their own place-based content, and tell their own stories. Critical GIS has informed us about the potential issues with the use of spatial technologies in Indigenous contexts, which we synthesize into three themes: 1. compartmentalizing and distilling Indigenous knowledges, 2. undermining Indigenous ways of knowing and of transferring knowledges, and 3. exploiting and assimilating Indigenous knowledges. These three criteria are used to assess what Indigenous communities should examine when engaging with the geoweb and Indigenous knowledges. Our analysis focuses on issues of data ownership, access, sharing, and appropriation. We point to ways in which Indigenous peoples should carefully assess various components of the geoweb to avoid the misrepresentation, distortion, assimilation, exclusion, and exploitation of Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous ways of transmitting knowledge. We conclude with potential solutions for development of the geoweb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Third Industrial Revolution evolved through the development of technology in the 1960s and has been mirrored in other professions as well as cartography. The first maps on the Internet for mass use appeared in the late 1990s. In the beginning, they were simple and modest. Computer development was also reflected in the development of digital cartography, and maps become interactive with users. Technology has made collecting spatial data easier and cheaper, and cartography has become available to ordinary users through various tools and services. Accordingly, emerging concepts and terms related to digital cartography are sometimes identical or match part of their domain of meaning. This article offers a review and analysis of keywords pertaining to digital cartography on the Internet. Different indicators are used to show trends in selected keywords' appearance and, thus, trends in cartography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on geospatial ontologies focuses on achieving interoperability by creating universal standards applied to data. We argue that universality through ontologies can potentially perpetuate homogenization of concepts, thus contributing to assimilation of Indigenous peoples. We cover the ways the conventional geospatial ontologies enable dichotomies between mental and physical concepts, reduce concepts during the classification process, attribute agency, and privilege ontological class over relationships. We further argue that the geospatial web and natural language processing should be inclusive of Indigenous people to ensure future access to geospatial technologies and to prevent further loss of Indigenous knowledge. We explore alternative approaches to universality such as hermeneutics and heuristics. These offer the potential for Indigenous geospatial ontologies considered as equal, instead of being reduced to fit within western concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more and more governments share open data, tech developers respond by creating apps using these data to generate content or provide services that citizens may find useful. More recently, there is an increase in popularity of the civic hackathon. These time-limited events gather tech enthusiasts, government workers and interested citizens, in a collaborative environment to apply government open data in developing software applications that address issues of shared civic importance. Building on the Johnson and Robinson (2014) framework for understanding the civic hackathon phenomenon, Canadian municipal staff with civic hackathon experience were interviewed about their motivations for and benefits derived from participation in these events. Two broad themes emerged from these interviews. First, through the development of prototypical apps using municipal open data and other data sets, civic hackathons help put open data into public use. Second, civic hackathons provide government staff with valuable feedback about municipal open data sets informing and evolving future open data releases. This paper concludes with reflections for urban planners about how civic hackathons might be used in their practice and with recommendations for municipal staff considering using civic hackathons to add value to municipal open data.

Summary Participatory approaches have proven effective at producing more inclusive and democratic forms of development, in which marginalized groups are given increased recognition. However, these approaches can also reinforce social hierarchies and political exclusion if they are not developed and implemented carefully. In particular, participatory approaches can be problematic if they too simplistically conceptualize democratic engagement as the folding of individuals into pre-existing governance structures. Utilizing a combination of feminist and postcolonial theories, this paper argues that practitioners of participatory methods must extend their thinking to the ways in which their projects foster engagement across multiple social and epistemological perspectives. Participatory geographic information systems (PGIS) methodologies are particularly effective at enabling these cross-perspectival engagements—geospatial technologies have unique capabilities for storing and visualizing knowledge from different types of knowledge systems. These different forms of knowledge can not only be visualized as multi-facetted and multi-scalar layers, but they can be directly placed in conversation with one another within the space of the map. In this way, they can be used to fundamentally transform historically unjust governance practices, rather than simply folding new subjects into unjust political structures. The authors examine these claims in the context of a case study with the Maijuna indigenous group of the northeastern Peruvian Amazon. The authors collaborated with the Maijuna to create and use a digital, spatial database to influence policy decisions about land tenure and environmental management. We show that geospatial technologies were uniquely capable of encouraging dialog and integration across indigenous, Western scientific, and state-based perspectives of the Amazon. These technologies are particularly effective at empowering traditionally marginalized perspectives within governance processes. This project therefore offers lessons about the benefits and dangers of geospatial technologies and methodologies for improving the democratic potential of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effective access to and reuse of geospatial information (GI) has come to be of critical value in modern knowledge based society. The standardized web services defined by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are frequently used for the implementation of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), to expose geospatial data, metadata and models on the Web. These GI are normally stored in an encoded geospatial layer, which is hidden from search engines. SDI uses a catalogue service for the web as a gateway to GI through the metadata defined by ISO standards, which are structurally diverse to OGC metadata. Therefore, a crosswalk needs to be implemented to bridge the OGC resources discovered on mainstream web with those documented by metadata in an SDI to enrich its information extent. We have to build mechanisms allowing entrepreneurs and developers access the information SDI is providing to build their apps. The paper reports a global wide and user friendly platform of OGC resources available on the web with the main goal to ensure and enhance the use of GI within a multidisciplinary context and to bridge the geospatial web from the end-user perspective, thus to open its borders to more web communities. The platform has been developed in the research project Borderless Geospatial Web (Bolegweb). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographic information science (GIScience) education has undergone enormous changes over the past years. One major factor influencing this change is the role of the geospatial web in GIScience. In addition to the use of the web for enabling and enhancing GIScience education, it is also used as the infrastructure for communicating and collaborating among geospatial data and users. The web becomes both the means and the content for a geospatial education program. However, the web does not replace the traditional face-to-face environment, but rather is a means to enhance it, expand it and enable an authentic and real world learning environment. This paper outlines the use of the web in both the delivery and content of the GIScience program at Curtin University. The teaching of the geospatial web, web and cloud based mapping, and geospatial web services are key components of the program, and the use of the web and online learning are important to deliver this program. Some examples of authentic and real world learning environments are provided including joint learning activities with partner universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maps have always been tools that have fascinated men, for their ability to make us see the world that surrounds us. They were and are the outcome of models and methods applied to the observation of the world, starting from geodesy, surveying photogrammetry and remote sensing. All these disciplines, which we now group under the new name of geomatics, have had a tremendous boost in recent years. However, the synergy with information computer technology is probably the aspect that is revolutionizing more cartography. Earlier computers and after the Internet have brought us to new concepts and tools that will have profound effects not only in the world of niche of cartographers, but also more generally in the life of all human beings. The Digital Earth, proposed in 1998 by Al Gore, has been enriched in just twenty years of a set of new demands, which make even more interesting and challenging being cartographers today. The paper, without claiming to be comprehensive, aims at providing a concise overview of the state of art and of the advancement in this area. Moreover, it urges the community of geomatics to be protagonist and promoter of a new cartography, largely to be reinvented, and that would put us at the center of processes of knowledge and management of the Earth. The map makers in the past helped discovering new worlds, now the challenge is to rediscover our common world with new eyes of environmental, social, economic equity, sustainability and participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advance of the World-Wide Web (WWW) technology, people can easily share content on the Web, including geospatial data and web services. Thus, the “big geospatial data management” issues start attracting attention. Among the big geospatial data issues, this research focuses on discovering distributed geospatial resources. As resources are scattered on the WWW, users cannot find resources of their interests efficiently. While the WWW has Web search engines addressing web resource discovery issues, we envision that the geospatial Web (i.e., GeoWeb) also requires GeoWeb search engines. To realize a GeoWeb search engine, one of the first steps is to proactively discover GeoWeb resources on the WWW. Hence, in this study, we propose the GeoWeb Crawler, an extensible Web crawling framework that can find various types of GeoWeb resources, such as Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services, Keyhole Markup Language (KML) and Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc (ESRI) Shapefiles. In addition, we apply the distributed computing concept to promote the performance of the GeoWeb Crawler. The result shows that for 10 targeted resources types, the GeoWeb Crawler discovered 7351 geospatial services and 194,003 datasets. As a result, the proposed GeoWeb Crawler framework is proven to be extensible and scalable to provide a comprehensive index of GeoWeb.