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The severity and impacts of forest fires have increased in the last years in several parts of the world, where devastating fires occur now almost every year. As these types of events are likely to increase due to climate changes, it is important to develop tools to assist authorities in the early identification and geolocation of ignitions so that they can be tackled as fast as possible. Several types of systems are currently being used, and others are under development, to automatically detect fires, based on, for example, thermal cameras and observation points; even so, the more systems available to detect these events and identify their location at an early stage, the better. This fact motivated the FireLoc project, currently under implementation, which aims to develop a system that will enable citizens to provide georeferenced data allowing the detection and geolocation of spotted fires in real time. The FireLoc system includes a dedicated app that enables citizens to report a spotted fire using their own smartphones. The app automatically collects the observer’s geolocation, a photograph of what is being observed, the orientation, and the approximate distance between the observer and the observed event. The FireLoc system stores reported data and includes functionalities for their validation, for data integration and processing to identify the location of spotted fires, as well as visualization of extracted information for several types of users, such as authorities and citizens. This paper presents the various components of the FireLoc project, the main challenges that are faced to obtain reliable geolocation of the observed events, and the results obtained with the first sets of collected data 031F-0B41-BD02 | José-Paulo Elvas DUARTE de ALMEIDA info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

A critical goal, is that organizations and citizens can easily access the geographic information required for good governance. However, despite the costly efforts of governments to create and implement Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs), this goal is far from being achieved. This is partly due to the lack of usability of the geoportals through which the geographic information is accessed. In this position paper, we present IDEAIS, a research network composed of multiple Ibero-American partners to address this usability issue through the use of Intelligent Systems, in particular Smart Voice Assistants, to efficiently recover and access geographic information., This research has received funding from CYTED, Ibero-American Program of Science and Technology for Development, GA No. 519RT0579

Estima, J., & Painho, M. (2016). User generated spatial content-integrator: Conceptual model to integrate data from diverse sources of user generated spatial content. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 5(10), [183]. DOI: 10.3390/ijgi5100183 Geographic information has been traditionally produced by mapping agencies and corporations, using highly skilled professionals as well as expensive precision equipment and procedures, in a very costly approach. The production of land use and land cover databases is just one example of such traditional approaches. At the same time, the amount of Geographic Information created and shared by citizens through the web has been increasing exponentially during the last decade as a result of the emergence and popularization of technologies such as theWeb 2.0, cloud computing, global positioning systems (GPS), smart phones, among others. This vast amount of free geographic data might have valuable information to extract. Combining data from several initiatives might further increase the value of such data. We propose a conceptual model to integrate data from suitable user generated spatial content initiatives. A prototype to demonstrate the ability of the model to perform such integration, based on two identified use cases, was also developed. publishersversion published

Geo-tagged photographs are used increasingly as a source of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), which could potentially be used for land use and land cover applications. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the feasibility of using this source of spatial information for three use cases related to land cover: Calibration, validation and verification. We first provide an inventory of the metadata that are collected with geo-tagged photographs and then consider what elements would be essential, desirable, or unnecessary for the aforementioned use cases. Geo-tagged photographs were then extracted from Flickr, Panoramio and Geograph for an area of London, UK, and classified based on their usefulness for land cover mapping including an analysis of the accompanying metadata. Finally, we discuss protocols for geo-tagged photographs for use of VGI in relation to land cover applications.

Citizens are increasingly becoming an important source of geographic information, sometimes entering domains that had until recently been the exclusive realm of authoritative agencies. This activity has a very diverse character as it can, amongst other things, be active or passive, involve spatial or aspatial data and the data provided can be variable in terms of key attributes such as format, description and quality. Unsurprisingly, therefore, there are a variety of terms used to describe data arising from citizens. In this article, the expressions used to describe citizen sensing of geographic information are reviewed and their use over time explored, prior to categorizing them and highlighting key issues in the current state of the subject. The latter involved a review of ~100 Internet sites with particular focus on their thematic topic, the nature of the data and issues such as incentives for contributors. This review suggests that most sites involve active rather than passive contribution, with citizens typically motivated by the desire to aid a worthy cause, often receiving little training. As such, this article provides a snapshot of the role of citizens in crowdsourcing geographic information and a guide to the current status of this rapidly emerging and evolving subject.

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Geographic Information Systems Traditional geographic information has been produced by mapping agencies and corporations, using high skilled people as well as expensive precision equipment and procedures, in a very costly approach. The production of land use and land cover databases are just one example of such traditional approach. On the other side, The amount of Geographic Information created and shared by citizens through the Web has been increasing exponentially during the last decade, resulting from the emergence and popularization of technologies such as the Web 2.0, cloud computing, GPS, smart phones, among others. Such comprehensive amount of free geographic data might have valuable information to extract and thus opening great possibilities to improve significantly the production of land use and land cover databases. In this thesis we explored the feasibility of using geographic data from different user generated spatial content initiatives in the process of land use and land cover database production. Data from Panoramio, Flickr and OpenStreetMap were explored in terms of their spatial and temporal distribution, and their distribution over the different land use and land cover classes. We then proposed a conceptual model to integrate data from suitable user generated spatial content initiatives based on identified dissimilarities among a comprehensive list of initiatives. Finally we developed a prototype implementing the proposed integration model, which was then validated by using the prototype to solve four identified use cases. We concluded that data from user generated spatial content initiatives has great value but should be integrated to increase their potential. The possibility of integrating data from such initiatives in an integration model was proved. Using the developed prototype, the relevance of the integration model was also demonstrated for different use cases.

Ponencias, comunicaciones y pósters presentados en el 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science "Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place", celebrado en la Universitat Jaume I del 3 al 6 de junio de 2014. Volunteered Geographic Information has been increasing exponentially over the last years, capturing the attention of the scientific community. Researchers have been very active exploring a vast amount of initiatives and trying to develop methodologies and possible real applications for this new source of geographic information. Land Use/Cover production is one of the areas where this type of geographic information might be very useful. In this paper we evaluate if geo-referenced and publicly available photos from the Flickr initiative can be used as a source of geographic information to help Land Use/Cover classification. Using the Corine Land Cover nomenclature, we compare the classification obtained for selected photo locations, against the classification obtained from high resolution satellite imagery for the same locations. We conclude that this source cannot be used alone for the purpose of Land Use/Cover classification but we also believe that it might contain helpful information if combined with other sources.