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The Rise of the GIS Volunteer

Geographic Information Science Research UK (GISRUK) is a unique conference, originally created as the UK’s national geographical information science (GIS) research conference in 1993. Around 200 delegates attend each year from across the UK, together with international delegates from the EU and further afield. The conference is particularly inclusive, providing new academics and postgraduate students with the opportunity to network and discuss ideas with established academics of international standing. It also provides an encouraging environment for those at the beginning of their GIS research career. The conference is currently in its 19th year and between 27th and 29th April 2011 was held at the University of Portsmouth in conjunction with the Ordnance Survey. Papers were presented covering a wide range of themes including historical GIS, health geography and urban planning and modelling. Of note were the numerous contributions on the allied topics of open source GIS and volunteered geographic information (VGI), reflecting a clear interest in these areas within the GIS research community at present. This special issue responds directly to this interest by presenting eight topical articles from the 2011 GISRUK conference. At the first GISRUK, now almost 20 years ago, GIS remained an activity that was dominated by specific applications of spatial technologies, undertaken by a relatively small number of highly-trained specialists in commerce and academia. The software, techniques and data underpinning their activities were expensive, complex and vendorspecific and this ensured that it remained beyond the reach of a mass, non-specialist user base. Research concerned with the participation of the public in GIS, (an important sub-discipline defined three years later at the 1996 National Centre for Geographic Information Analysis workshop in Orono, Maine), remained largely absent from the proceedings. The contrast with the activities presented at this year’s GISRUK could, therefore, not be more stark. The ubiquity of personal devices with spatial positioning capabilities coupled with free spatial software tools (e.g. Google Earth, which was downloaded for the billionth time in October 2011), has allowed many millions of non-specialist users with no formal GIS training to access, capture and publish spatial data at will. This has led to a range of new challenges, questions, opportunities and concerns for GIS researchers. Indeed, the last two decades has seen nothing short of a revolution in GIS in which the increasing democratization of the discipline (Dragicevic 2004, Sieber, 2006) has been an unstoppable outcome. Central to this revolution have been two key developments: