Location and place are effectives means to organize, analyze and understand our world and how we live.
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Trends in spatial thinking includes how GPS affects how we think about our world and navigation. Also the use of place, and how vernacular geography is used to describe it. One must avoid the temptation to think of place only as a location. (DSTL) A place is distinguished by its people, markets, governments, and institutions, as much as it is by its physical landscape and natural resources, transportation systems (including streets and roads), buildings, and boundaries- (US National Academies). |
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“Location targeting is holy grail for marketers”- Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP CEO, MWC 2011 By measuring the entropy of each individual’s trajectory, we find a 93% potential predictability in user mobility - Limits of Predictability in Human Mobility, Science 2010 1st law of geography: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” - Waldo Tobler. |
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As well as geospatial information, Governments and government bodies are increasingly reliant on statistical data to inform policy and decision making. As resources become constrained, it is increasingly important to make sure they are used in the most effective way possible. Geography is often the medium through which statistics are interpreted whether at global, regional, national or sub‐national level. As the need for better statistics increases so does the need for greater integration of statistics and geospatial information, resulting in so called spatial statistics - (GGIM). |
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Well-organized and comprehensive human geography data can be applied to analysis that allows us to better anticipate the behavior of people over space and time and to inform decision-making that supports human security, including crisis mitigation and humanitarian response - (WWHGD_WG). |
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Personal electronic devices now measure much of our activity and context. New methods to capture, quantify and communicate individual human activity at a micro level are now available, e.g., OASIS’s Classification of Everyday Living (COEL). Rating services for individual behaviors, e.g., risk rating, will develop similar to credit risk rating services. |
Previous Trends
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Spatial thinking is a collection of cognitive skills. The skills consist of declarative and perceptual forms of knowledge and some cognitive operations that can be used to transform, combine, or otherwise operate on this knowledge. The key to spatial thinking is a constructive amalgam of three elements: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning. (US National Academies) OGC should consider how the innovation it promotes can extend this "learning spatial" to "doing spatial". (This topic has bee made part of SpatialThinking ) |
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People who communicate digitally also tend to meet in person. 90% of users who have called each other have also shared the same space (cell tower), even if they live far apart. |
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Targeted advertising is at the heart of the largest technology companies today, and is becoming increasingly precise. Simultaneously, users generate more and more personal data that is shared with advertisers as more and more of daily life becomes intertwined with networked technology. The online advertising ecosystem is built upon the ability of advertising networks to know properties about users (e.g., their interests or physical locations) and deliver targeted ads based on those properties - (Paul Vines, Franziska Roesner, and Tadayoshi Kohno). |