Spatial data infrastructures and geospatial data 

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Chapter 3 The context for user-generated content

Overview of the chapter

In Chapter 2, I discussed spatial data infrastructures (SDIs), geospatial data, classification and related concepts. This chapter provides further context for the rest of this thesis and all the subsequent chapters draw on it. Specifically, this chapter examines what made the proliferation of user-generated content and volunteered geographical information and the development of spatial data infrastructures possible, and the impact of such fecun-dity: inter networking (which is much more than just the Internet and the World Wide Web), online services and content, the Semantic Web, social media, privacy, censorship, liability, the right to exploit content, curation, the digital divide and standards.

• Section 3.2 provides an overview of the development of inter networking, looking at the good, the bad and how inter-networking magnifies behaviours.
• Section 3.3 discusses the dot.com bubble and Section 3.4 what came after the bust: mashups, archiving, portals, agents or bots, Web scraping and harvesting, search engines, cloud computing, collaboration software, software as a service, syndica-tion, mobile computing, exploiting the long tail, the Internet of things, games, the sharing economy, replacing analogue services and the deep Web.
• Section 3.5 introduces the Semantic Web, which has the intention of linking together content from within and across documents and repositories, such as SDIs.

Section 3.6 discusses social media services, of which there is a great variety. As well as recreation and entertainment, such services can hopefully also promote social justice

Inter-networking technologies

The good

Computer networks have been in existence for over 50 years, starting with military projects such as SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), a system that connected radar stations to central control centres for tracking enemy bombers. During the 1960s, com-puter networks evolved from being only dedicated networks with a narrow range of tasks, such as SAGE, into general purpose networks. During 1962 at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc, JCR Licklider (who had worked on SAGE) developed his ideas for the Intergalactic Computer Network, which he subsequently presented to the Advanced Re-search Projects Agency (ARPA) [Licklider 1963], where he was the first head of computer research [Leiner, Barry M and Cerf, Vinton G and Clark, David D and Kahn, Robert E and Kleinrock, Leonard and Lynch, Daniel C and Postel, Jon and Roberts, Larry G and Wolff, Stephen 2003]. This led to the implementation of ARPA’s ARPANET in 1969, the first production network connecting together heterogeneous computers. In turn, this led to the development of inter-networking, the connection of multiple independent computer networks of arbitrary design via gateways or routers.
The development of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in 1973 allowed other computer networks to connect to ARPANET and to each other, and the Internet was born [Leiner, Barry M and Cerf, Vinton G and Clark, David D and Kahn, Robert E and Kleinrock, Leonard and Lynch, Daniel C and Postel, Jon and Roberts, Larry G and Wolff, Stephen 2003]. On 24 October 1995, the American Federal Network-ing Council (FNC) came up with the following definition of “Internet”, after consulting widely:
The Federal Networking Council (FNC) agrees that the following language reflects our definition of the term “Internet”.
“Internet” refers to the global information system that –is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the In-ternet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons
The Internet is but one implementation of internet technology, such as TCP/IP. Other im-plementations of internet technology include the military networks in many countries, that have no connection to the Internet. The technologies, standards, documentation and devices needed to set up a network based on internet technology are readily available, and there are many who have the skills to set up their own “Internets” for whatever reason they might want to do so.
As mentioned above, internet technology is but one way of doing inter-networking, and there are still other technologies being used for inter-networking today. For example, I first made use of email through a FidoNet [FidoNet 2016] account at Rhodes University in the late 1980s. FidoNet is a point-to-point and store-and-forward email network us-ing dial-up modems and with gateways to other networks and FidoNet was intended “to be a cooperative anarchy to provide minimal-cost public access to electronic mail” [Bush 1993]. FidoNet allowed us to send emails to users on other networks. Set up ini-tially to support communication between bulletin board systems (BBSs), mainly through short dial-up sessions, FidoNet is still being used, particularly in Russia and the Ukraine [FidoNet 2016].
Initially, the main functions of the Internet were to enable researchers to access resources on remote computers (such as specialized software or powerful computers), exchange files (through FTP, the file transfer protocol) and exchange email. Then, mailing lists were added, followed by online games, news groups, BBSs, instant messaging and chat rooms. By the mid 1980s, the number of institutions connected to the various inter-networks and the number of users started increasing dramatically, resulting in an even bigger increase in the information available online. The Internet grew from 4 hosts in 1969, to 188 in 1979 and 159 000 in 1989, and from 837 networks in 1989 to over 134 000 by 1996 [Zakon 2006]. This growth spurred the development of indexing and searching systems, such as Archie, Gopher and the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), and the use of markup languages, particularly the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), for labelling parts of a document.
At the same time, Tim Berners-Lee developed the network-based hypertext system, the World Wide Web (WWW), using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for communicating between clients and servers. However, to take off, that needed the development and dis-semination of browsers, such as Mosaic. SGML spawned a variety of widely-used markup languages, such as the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), used for Web pages, and the Extensible Markup Language (XML), for encoding documents so that they are both human and machine readable. The WWW grew from one Web site in 1990, to 23 500 in 1995 and over 25 million in 2000 [Zakon 2006]. By 2015, the WWW was estimated to have 47 billion Web pages [Dewey 2015a].
Through until 1989, ARPANET, NSFNET and the other major networks (such as JANET, the academic network in the UK) were closed to commercial traffic, though there were other, public, networks that carried commercial and/or private traffic from the late 1960s, such as Telenet, Tymnet, CompuServe, BITNET and Usenet. For many years the inter-networked community was small and the research and academic networks were largely self-regulating (which worked well), through the documented concept of netiquette (net etiquette) [Templeton 1991; Hambridge 1995], which was developed over the 1970s and 1980s in response to network abuses and mistakes.

And the bad

Gradually, commercial pressures increased — I remember well, unfortunately, when the small American law firm of Canter & Seigal¹ performed the first, massive commercial spamming of many Usenet news groups on 12 April 1994. Similar was the political spamming of news groups about the Armenian massacre by “Serdar Argıç” (an alias), also in early 1994 (which I also remember), with many of ‘his’ postings probably be-ing produced automatically by a program scanning news groups for certain key words [Wikimedia 2016].
Malicious activities on the Internet also began in the 1980s. Although experimental and mostly harmless self-replicating programs (computer viruses and the like) were written and released during the 1970s, the first malicious and destructive computer viruses (eg: Elk Cloner, ARF-ARF, Brain and Ping-Pong²) appeared during the 1980s, though spread primarily through sharing diskettes, rather than through computer networks [Wikimedia 2016]. The first significant worm, developed by Robert Morris, was released in 1988 and led to the first successful prosecution for such as offence [US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit 1991].
Spam and scam emails are very common, with many being labelled as 419 scams, from the relevant clause in the Nigerian Criminal Code Act in Part 6, Division 1, Chapter 38, Obtaining Property by false pretences; Cheating. Clause 419 covers “any person who by any false pretence, and with intent to defraud, obtains from any other person anything capable of being stolen, or induces any other person to deliver to any person anything capable of being stolen,. . any person who by any false pretence or by means of any other fraud obtains credit for himself or any other person” [Nigeria, Federation of nd]. As well as such criminal activities, some people create fake lives on the Web to compensate for whatever deficiencies they might have. As an experiment, Zilla van den Born showed how easy it was to pretend to be on a trip in Asia, without leaving Amsterdam [Reynolds 2014].
Really troubling is digital communication that is harmful, particularly cyber-bullying or harassment over the Web, and trolling. A survey by the Pew Research Center reporting that 40% of users had suffered harassment [Gross 2014]. These actions include verbal abuse, humiliation, discrimination, threats of physical violence, stalking and sexual ha-rassment, such as “revenge porn”: publishing online compromising or sexually-explicit photographs of the victim, such as by a former partner. The harassment takes place pri-marily on social media Web sites and applications, then in the comments section of Web sites, in online gaming, by email, on discussion sites, and on dating sites and applications, and much harassment is anonymous [Gross 2014]. Besides vendettas, cyber-bullying is also used to target celebrities and activists, such as women promoting gender equality

Publications out of this thesis 
Acknowledgements 
Table of contents 
List of figures 
List of tables 
Acronyms 
1 Overview of this thesis 
1.1 Overview of the chapter
1.2 The context and justification for this research
1.3 Statement of the problem
1.4 Background
1.5 Summary and looking ahead
2 Spatial data infrastructures and geospatial data 
2.1 Overview of the chapter
2.2 Spatial data infrastructure
2.3 Geospatial data or geographical information
2.4 Classification, taxonomy, ontologies, folksonomies, etc
2.5 Models for geospatial data in a GIS
2.6 Formal models
2.7 Data quality and metadata
2.8 Incremental updating and versioning
2.9 Cartography
2.10 Virtual globes and geobrowsers
2.11 Summary and looking ahead
3 The context for user-generated content 
3.1 Overview of the chapter
3.2 Inter-networking technologies
3.3 The dot.com bubble
3.4 After the dot.com bust
3.5 The SemanticWeb
3.6 Social media services
3.7 Social mapping
3.8 Controlling the Internet
3.9 Privacy, censorship and liability
3.10 The right to exploit content
3.11 Curation
3.12 The digital divide
3.13 Standards
3.14 Summary and looking ahead
4 User-generated content and volunteered geographical information 
4.1 Overview of the chapter
4.2 User-generated content, crowd-sourcing, citizen science and neogeography are not the same!
4.3 User-generated content
4.4 Citizen science .
4.5 Volunteered geographical information
4.6 Crowd source
4.7 Neogeography
4.8 Validity of user-generated content in scholarly research
4.9 Citing
4.10 Summary and looking ahead
5 Metadata 
5.1 Overview of the chapter
5.2 Definition of metadata
5.3 Aspects of metadata
5.4 Encoding metadata
5.5 Metadata and specifications
5.6 Metadata tools
5.7 Categories of metadata
5.8 Standards for metadata
5.9 The limitations of metadata
5.10 Metadata vs searching
5.11 Metadata and linked open data
5.12 VGI and metadata
5.13 Summary and looking ahead
6 Quality 
6.1 Overview of the chapter
6.2 Aspects of geospatial data quality
6.3 Four stages of recognising the quality of a resource
6.4 GNSS errors
6.5 Commonly used dimensions of quality for geospatial data
6.6 Further perspectives on the dimensions of quality
6.7 Quality of volunteered geographical information
6.8 Assessing the quality of several VGI repositories
6.9 Using quality to classify geospatial data
6.10 Standards for the quality of geospatial data
6.11 Summary and looking ahead .
7 Perceptions of virtual globes, VGI and SDIs 251
7.1 Overview of the chapter
7.2 Background to the questionnaire
7.3 Summary of the results from CODIST-I
7.4 Summary of the results from GISSA Gauteng
7.5 Analysis of the results from CODIST-I and GISSA
7.6 Conclusions
7.7 Summary and looking ahead
8 Assessing qualitatively taxonomies of user generated content 
8.1 Overview of the chapter
8.2 Taxonomies of UGC and VGI
8.3 Repositories containing VGI used for assessing taxonomies
8.4 Qualitative assessment of published taxonomies of UGC
8.5 VGI repositories and citizen science
8.6 Summary of the qualitative assessment
8.7 Preliminary taxonomy of user generated content
8.8 Summary and looking ahead
9 Using formal concept analysis to assess taxonomies 
9.1 Overview of the chapter
9.2 Formal concept analysis (FCA)
9.3 FCA and the feature model
9.4 Applying formal concept analysis to assess taxonomies
9.5 Stability exploration
9.6 Assessing the discrimination adequacy of existing taxonomies of UGC
9.7 Summary and looking ahead
10 Conclusions 
10.1 Overview
10.2 Review
10.3 Future research topics
A Questionnaire on VGI 
B Published taxonomies of user generated content
Bibliography 
Web pages 
Colophon

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