Exploiting Volunteered Geographic Information to describe Place

Traditional geographic information focuses on well-structured spatial data, generally based on either crisp objects or continuous fields, which usually reflect an institutional viewpoint and the purpose for which a dataset was collected. The attributes of such data are typically single valued at a given location or for a given object and thus, by definition, cannot reflect multiple viewpoints. Such representations are of course well suited to many tasks where we apply geographic information (for example querying the rateable value of individual houses or the elevation of a particular point in space). Equally, though it is clear that if we asked ten GISRUK participants about Manchester, we would hear ten differing perspectives on the place that is Manchester and that these perspectives would reflect the experiences and backgrounds of those that we asked. To date, relatively little research in GIScience has focussed on these multiple perspectives, in contrast to work in human geography where the notion of place is seen as central to the discipline itself (Cresswell, 2004). Fisher and Unwin (2005) recognised this gap within GIScience research: