New Generation Platforms for Exploration of Crowdsourced Geo-Data

This chapter addresses two recent topics in the field of geo-information, the former more technological and the latter more scientific. On one side, there is an emerging trend of visualizing data and their changes in space and time through multidimensional geospatial clients and/or virtual globes. In the most advanced cases, these are not simply plain viewers but also allow analysis of the data by acting as “multidimensional intelligent geo-viewers”. On the other side, citizen science is providing a great momentum to the possibility of lay people taking part in scientific development. It is a new, citizen-centred paradigm which, in most cases, takes advantage of the individual and collective augmented capability of sensing the surrounding world through the sensors that we wear. The “citizen sensors” will consciously contribute to this development, either through volunteered geographic information or by being themselves an unconscious part of the data analytics, which makes use of geo-crowdsourced data to extract information in order to create a higher level understanding of natural and manmade phenomena. This chapter seeks to outline the Web technological solutions for visualizing and analyzing such data, through a summary of the current state of the art and the original applications developed by the authors.