Geoscience Reference
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like Google Maps, talks about GPX versus KML,
and geotags his photos to make a map of his
summer vacation. [TUR 06, p.2]
For other observers, it is not so much about replacing a
professional geographical practice, but rather about
enriching it. This can be done by adding people's subjectivity
to the picture, which is often excluded from GIS. According
to Andrew Hudson-Smith, neogeography helps to bridge the
gap between old and new actors in cartography:
It is the essence of neo-geography: free, easy to
use and yet potentially very powerful in terms of
its impact on geographical information sciences,
social sciences, and its capacity to encourage a
new partnership between professionals, lay
amateurs and the wider public. [HUD 09, p.534]
The “wikification of the GIS” [SUI 08, MER 10] also
underlines this overlap between GIS and Web maps:
This new phase of development is the wikification
of GIS, which is driven primarily by the massive
and voluntary collaboration among both amateurs
and experts using Web 2.0 technology. Obviously,
the wikification of GIS is part of the explosive
growth of user-created content on the Web as
evidenced by the growing popularity of MySpace,
Facebook, YouTube. [SUI 08, p.1]
Michael Goodchild took this idea further with the term
volunteered geographic information
(VGI) [GOO 07b], which
indicates the creation of geographical content by its users
through the application Web 2.0. This includes digital
geographical information processing such as the creation of
interactive mapping within the project OpenStreetMap, or
the
geotagging
of photographs on Flickr, as part of civic
sciences or humanitarian crisis mapping.
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