Volunteered Geographic Information and Computational Geography: New Perspectives

Abstract: Volunteered geographic information (VGI), one of the most important types of user-generated web content, has been emerging as a new phenomenon. VGI is contributed by numerous volunteers and supported by web 2.0 technologies. This chapter discusses how VGI provides new perspectives for computational geography, a transformed geography based on the use of data-intensive computing and simulations to uncover the underlying mechanisms behind geographic forms and processes. We provide several exemplars of computational geography using OpenStreetMap data and GPS traces to investigate the scaling of geographic space and its implications for human mobility patterns. We illustrate that the field of geography is experiencing a dramatic change and that geoinformatics and computational geography deserve to be clearly distinguished, with the former being a study of engineering and the latter being a science. Keywords geoinformatics, openstreetmap, scaling of geographic space, spatial heterogeneity