The smart way to get the inside track

Researchers in Maynooth are finding ways in which we can all become travel guides or health advisors by sharing knowledge through ‘geocomputation’

PICTURE YOURSELF on a walkabout in an unfamiliar city. You are looking for food, Italian preferably or perhaps French. Your pocket map can’t help but your smart phone can. Within a few seconds it identifies where you are, suggests eateries, gives you the opinions of previous customers and then relays directions to get you there.

Too good to be true? Not according to an NUI Maynooth researcher participating in a pan-European research effort to deliver this kind of on-the-go data.

Prof Stewart Fotheringham is director of the Science Foundation Ireland funded National Centre for Geocomputation at Maynooth and has joined with colleagues in Germany, Denmark, Switzerland and Greece in a project called “Geocrowd”.

This four-year, €6 million project hopes to open up the “next generation” of internet-based data access.

The main difference to earlier technologies is that in this case the recipient of the information will also be a participant in producing it, says Prof Fotheringham.

Maynooth’s role will be in providing spatial data to this new type of internet service, the geocomputation. “Geocomputation is anything to do with storing, managing, accessing and displaying of spatial data, data that has coordinates attached to them,” he explains. “We are experts in handling that kind of data.”

The idea is that a user receives information about where they are but also about what there is around them. “It is trying to capture information about where people are and also about the environment they are in.”

He emphasises that it is a two-way street in this new world. “You are both a contributor and a receiver of the information. You are providing the information when you are at a given location.”

He likens the goal to gathering, filtering and interpreting the millions of “vapour trails” left behind by those using the internet to tweet, send pictures to Flickr, text or message.

It represents a blend of data with your position on the planet identified by a GPS signature and the supplementary information delivered – or sent by you – as needed. The introductory example describes finding a good nearby restaurant but such a system could provide other useful information.

If those close to your geographic location are texting, tweeting or Googling about “flu symptoms”, this could indicate a bug is moving through an area.

If you visit a city with little time to spare but want to see a few sights, Geocrowd could get you quickly to the nearest attractions, with your selection informed by comments from others. And you in turn could leave behind your delight or dissatisfaction with what you have visited.

Prof Fotheringham referred to newspaper reports last weekend that described an effort by China to track, using GPS data, the whereabouts of all 17 million residents of Beijing. The suggestion was this would be used for traffic management, but it could also warn of unusual numbers of people assembling, for example, to protest, he says.

He acknowledges that monitoring people’s whereabouts could be used for good or ill. It could help locate friends separated at a concert venue but could also reduce freedom and privacy. “That is a debate society has to have.”

Yet a remarkable amount of personal information is readily surrendered over services like Facebook or Flickr that describe where we are, what we think, our habits and our experiences, he points out.

Much of the data is already moving through the ether, so it is a matter of finding how to capture it and then how to make it of value to a user. “That is a research question: how do you get useful information out of it.”

There seems little doubt that this new spatial data source will add to existing information resources. The internet changes so rapidly that what we do today will seem “positively primitive” in a few years time, he says.

Geospatial information is already out there over Googlemaps, Wikiwalk and other applications. “The next step is real time, user generated, three dimensional data that brings inanimate buildings and objects alive, infused with other peoples’ experiences of them,” Prof Fotheringham says.

The Geocrowd consortium is now recruiting 13 international PhD students to take part in the research at one of the six member universities. Funding comes under the Marie Curie programme. More details from geocrowd.eu