SPP 1894: Volunteered Geographic Information: Interpretation, Visualisation and Social Computing

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In the past years Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has emerged as a novel form of user-generated content, which involves active generation of geo-data for example in citizen science projects as well as the passive collection of data via the user's location-enabled mobile devices. In addition there are more and more sensors available that detect our environment with ever greater detail and dynamics. The interpretation and visualisation of such information is challenging because of the large heterogeneity of the underlying multi-source data and the requirement of considering social context factors. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has initialised a Priority Programme 'VGI: Interpretation, Visualisation and Social Computing', which will support interdisciplinary research projects related to this topic. The coordination of this Priority Programme will contribute significantly to the sustainable establishment of this research network. Therefore first of all joint research questions and objectives have to be derived from the submitted individual project proposals. Secondly, the cooperation between different project partners should encouraged and supported, in order to work on synthesis and integration of research and development work. A third objective of coordination is the initialisation of cross-project application scenarios, as well as the support with the comparative evaluation of methods and software tools. The specific tasks associated with the coordination of the Priority Programme can be subdivided into software development, research, qualification and administration. Software development tasks aimed at assisting in retrieval and management of user-generated spatial content and the establishment of a VGI-repository as coordinated project archive for organisation and access to data, software tools and documents. With that a sustainable use of selected software modules should be realised, in particular for the development of cross-project applications cases in the second phase of the Priority Programme. Research questions to be investigated as part of the coordination project will deal with integration and abstraction of user-generated, spatial data from multi-sources with varying spatial and temporal resolution, for example also for a synergetic use of VGI with authoritative reference data. As part of the Priority Programme SPP-VGI a summer school will be offered on the thematic area of geographic information retrieval, text analysis, semantic interpretation and visual analysis for the qualification of PhD students. Concept and realisation of the summer school, as well as biannual organisation of PhD workshops are main tasks of the coordination team. Administrative tasks will further support the internal and external communications as well as the networking activities of the consortium.