G3 a Few Months In

We’re now a few months in to the G3 project, and here’s the story so far:

- We’ve conducted and documented a number of in-depth interviews with members in our target groups of urban design, urban anthropology, history and environmental management.

- The interviews have been analysed, common themes and tasks identified, scenarios developed and then ‘translated’ into the language of GIS so that they can be implemented as teaching tools. We’re now looking at identifying data for each scenario.

- We’ve designed the end-to-end architecture of our scenario creation tool – this wasn’t as easy as a simple web site design, given that we want to build something extensible – i.e. that can grow as more scenarios are identified.

- We’ve set up our webserver, migrated a massive amount of existing reference code across, and started looking at the design of our scenarios from the end user perspective. We plan to use a step-by-step approach to allow our students to move through the learning process at their own page. The tool will validate that they understand the concepts as they go through.

- We’ve talked to a number of people involved in GIS teaching to identify how they approach introducing people from other disciplines to GIS.

So, we’d like to take the opportunity to say thanks to all the people who have participated in the project so far! We’ve promised most of you anonymity, but watch this space to see how your input has shaped the work.

If GIS were a Language......?

As part of the annual GISRUK conference this year (which was held at Portsmouth, I organised an unprogramme session in the spirit of Where Camp. This is something new to the attendees of GISRUK but nevertheless it gave the project team the chance to introduce the project and debate some of the issues we have been engaging with as a team. One of the discussions centred on the idea that if GIS were a language – what would be the equivalent of saying, “hello, my name is Kate”.This is interesting because in one of my project interviews a participant discussed the langauage of GIS too.

The analysis of the interviews a have enabled me to build a list of geographic concepts that our scenarios will support but we are interested to know what your thoughts maybe...... Which geographic concept do you think is the starting point to learning a new language of GIS? In the not too distant future we will be posting a questionnaire to collate your opinions.

Importance of knowing location

The user interviews are revealing many insights that as a GIS expert I take for granted. One of the interviewees revealed that just being able to maps of things they are interested in is a big thing for their field. We should not take for granted the simplicity and importance that just knowing about location means we can create a map.

So one of the first geographic concepts that we need to consider is that almost everything happens somewhere, and by knowing this where, we can build a map.

Child of Ten Standard of User Interface Design

A useful benchmark in user interface design is the Child of Ten standard. This means that a child of ten should be able to learn to do something useful with the system within 10 minutes. This indicates that a system is “easy to use”. In 1998 Al Gore discussed this in the context of GIS and digital globes as cited by Goodchild his paper “the Use Case of Digital Earth” in 2008.

I do not know if this has actually been validated for digital globes such as NASA World Wind or GoogleEarth but from personal experience I am absolutely certain they are easier to use, easier to learn and easier to remember the functionality than proprietary desktop GIS.

In this project we aim to develop a useful and usable GeoWeb application for non experts and so this benchmark could be incorporated into the testing and development phase – can non-experts learn to do something in our application within 10 minutes? Something to consider.....

GIS not SPSS!

My undergraduate dissertation students seem to run in the opposite direction if I suggest they use a GIS to explore their data. Why is this?

On discussion, it seems they consider GIS to equal numbers and statistics which they are afraid of. This is also a theme identified in the analysis of the user interviews I have been conducting. My interviewees, in the main, are not quantitative researchers with a little knowledge of GIS but think it could be potentially useful for their subject area. They are much more comfortable with using data that are non numerical in nature. This has got me thinking...

• Do you have to a high degree of statistical literacy to “do GIS” ?
  
  
• Does the idea that to "do GIS" you need to be good at mathematics act as a barrier to entry?
  
  
• Is the idea true, to "do GIS" do you need to be good at mathematics?

Congratulate me - I'm a data scientist

(And, if you are reading this blog, you might be one too).


David Flanders (at JISC, who fund the G3 project) has asked us to comment on a report about the O’Reilly Strata Big Data conference (the report can be found http://cottagelabs.com/strata-2011-review/) and to comment how we think that Big Data will impact our project. I was also lucky enough to attend a workshop on linked data last week (hosted by the British Computer Society and the UK Location programme). As I see it, there is a lot of overlap between these topics.


Firstly, what do I understand by ‘Big Data’ and ‘Linked Data’? Well, for me the words ‘Big Data’ refer to large datasets (multi-millions of elements). However, in the Strata report, ‘Big Data’ is defined in a broader context – it is about processing and managing data (especially large data) and gaining a competitive advantage from analyzing this data and combining it in new ways. ‘Linked Data’ also seeks to make new information from connections between individual elements of data – but in perhaps a much more defined way, using Universal Resource Indicators and Triples.


What strikes me about both ‘Big Data’ and ‘Linked Data’ is that they are two perspectives on the same problem – there is an amazing amount of information out there, and most of it is not stored in standard relational database format (tables, keys, constraints). The unstructured nature of the data makes it far more difficult to extract useful information, make links between datasets and generate new thinking from this data.


However, do ‘big data’ and ‘linked data’ really refer to new problems? Perhaps in terms of the sheer variety of datasets that are now available, and the format it is stored in. On the other hand, we’ve been trying to share and combine data for a very long time to generate new information. Indeed, one of the strengths of a GIS is the ability to create spatial joins on data - linking two items of data that occur at the same location – rather than traditional relational joins. More datasets and different ways of storing and publishing information just make this problem more complicated.


Will these issues impact our project? Not in the short term, as we are providing pre-packaged datasets to be used in pre-created scenarios (so the integration is done already). In general, however, data issues are certainly worth thinking about as GIS professionals.


Oh, and why are we now data scientists? – because, according to the Strata report, we “manage and explore large datasets, and perform up-to-real time analysis”, perform “science-like activities – statistical analysis, complex computational problems” and are “employees, searching for ways to add value to products.”

Urban Design User Expert Interview Summary

This word cloud summarises one of the interviews I conducted with user experts as part of the JISCG3 project. It highlights words repeatedly spoken during the interview and is a useful way of indicating several themes we discussed:

· The scale used in urban design projects from context to site to building

· The importance of software such as AutoCad and Photoshop

· The use of maps

· The use of GIS

The word cloud provides a recap of the interview prior to moving on to more conventional qualitative analysis, which begins with the identification of themes used to encode all the interviews transcripts. I particularly like the placement of the 3 words GIS, think and maps!

As part of the project we are interviewing experts from urban design, environmental management and anthropology in order to develop useful use case scenarios particular to new GIS learners from different disciplines.