Dr Sam Meek CGeog (GIS)

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Processing Service (WPS) standard enables access to a centralized repository of processes and services from compliant clients. A crucial part of the standard includes the provision to chain disparate processes and services to form a reusable workflow. To date this has been realized by methods such as embedding XML requests, using Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engines and other external orchestration engines. Although these allow the user to… Show more

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Processing Service (WPS) standard enables access to a centralized repository of processes and services from compliant clients. A crucial part of the standard includes the provision to chain disparate processes and services to form a reusable workflow. To date this has been realized by methods such as embedding XML requests, using Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engines and other external orchestration engines. Although these allow the user to define tasks and data artifacts as web services, they are often considered inflexible and complicated, often due to vendor specific solutions and inaccessible documentation. This paper introduces a new method of flexible service chaining using the standard Business Process Markup Notation (BPMN). A prototype system has been developed upon an existing open source BPMN suite to illustrate the advantages of the approach. The motivation for the software design is qualification of crowdsourced data for use in policy-making. The software is tested as part of a project that seeks to qualify, assure, and add value to crowdsourced data in a biological monitoring use case. Show less

Crowdsourcing as a means of data collection has produced previously unavailable data assets and enriched existing ones, but its quality can be
highly variable. This presents several challenges to potential end users that are concerned with the validation and quality assurance of the data
collected. Being able to quantify the uncertainty, define and measure the different quality elements associated with crowdsourced data, and
introduce means for dynamically assessing and improving it is… Show more

Crowdsourcing as a means of data collection has produced previously unavailable data assets and enriched existing ones, but its quality can be
highly variable. This presents several challenges to potential end users that are concerned with the validation and quality assurance of the data
collected. Being able to quantify the uncertainty, define and measure the different quality elements associated with crowdsourced data, and
introduce means for dynamically assessing and improving it is the focus of this paper. We argue that the required quality assurance and quality
control is dependent on the studied domain, the style of crowdsourcing and the goals of the study. We describe a framework for qualifying
geolocated data collected from non-authoritative sources that enables assessment for specific case studies by creating a workflow supported by an
ontological description of a range of choices. The top levels of this ontology describe seven pillars of quality checks and assessments that present a
range of techniques to qualify, improve or reject data. Our generic operational framework allows for extension of this ontology to specific applied
domains. This will facilitate quality assurance in real-time or for post-processing to validate data and produce quality metadata. It enables a system
that dynamically optimises the usability value of the data captured. A case study illustrates this framework. Show less

This article outlines the methodology and results of experiments that were designed to understand the accuracy and effects of digital surface model choices for visibility querying in mobile applications.

Recording points of interest using GPS whilst working in the field is an established technique in geographical fieldwork, where the user′s current position is used as the spatial reference to be captured; this is known as geo-tagging. We outline the development and evaluation of a smartphone application called Zapp that enables geo-tagging of any distant point on the visible landscape.

This paper presents findings from a field study of 24 individuals who kept diaries of their web use, across device and location, for a period of four days. Our focus was on how the web was used for non-work purposes, with a view to understanding how this is intertwined with everyday life.