Andrea Ballatore

King's College London | KCL · Department of Digital Humanities

This article addresses the emergent phenomenon of carto-vandalism, the intentional defacement of collaborative cartographic digital artefacts in the context of volunteered geographic information. Through a qualitative analysis of reported incidents in WikiMapia and OpenStreetMap, a typology of this kind of vandalism is outlined, including play, ide...

Geographic maps constitute a ubiquitous medium through which we understand, construct, and navigate our natural and built surroundings. At the intersection of the explosion of geographic information online, data-mining techniques, and the increasing popularity of Web maps, a novel possibility has emerged: Instead of generating one map for large num...

Every day, billions of Internet users rely on search engines to find information about places to make decisions about tourism, shopping, and countless other economic activities. In an opaque process, search engines assemble digital content produced in a variety of locations around the world and make it available to large cohorts of consumers. Altho...

Museums are important centres of heritage, culture, education, and tourism. These diverse institutions operate in different ways, reaching different audiences and managing varied collections. Thanks to a novel database of unprecedented completeness produced by the project, this study provides a quantitative geography of museums in the UK, showing h...

Editorial: GeoAI in urban analytics

Objective This study examined changes food and drink purchasing during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic in England, and if changes varied by population subgroups. Design We investigated changes in take-home food and drink purchasing and frequency of out-of-home purchasing using an interrupted time series analysis design. The start o...

Introduction Evidence for the effect of neighbourhood food environment (NFE) exposures on diet in the UK is mixed, potentially due to exposure misclassification. This study used the first national COVID-19 lockdown in England as an opportunity to isolate the independent effects of the NFE exposure on food and drink purchasing, and assessed whether...

This paper investigates the geography of Facebook use at an urban-regional scale, focussing on place-named groups, meaning various interest groups with names relating to places such as towns, neighbourhoods, or points of interest. Conceptualising Facebook as a digital infrastructure – that is, the platform’s urban footprint, in the form of its plac...

Graph theory has long provided the basis for the computational modelling of urban flows and networks and, thus, for the study of urban form. The development of graph-convolutional neural networks offers the opportunity to explore new applications of deep learning approaches in urban studies. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised graph represent...

This article presents the preliminary results of a think-aloud leisure walking study, identifying the key themes and platial narratives. A think-aloud study was conducted to explore what and how leisure walkers engaged with while walking. Our emerging results are presented in the context of an approach to extracting and understanding the platial ex...

This paper examines social media activity by UK museums during the COVID‐19 pandemic. There is a general perception that as museums closed their doors for extended periods, their digital presence increased to maintain connections with their audiences. However, much of the research conducted in this area is based on small‐scale studies and examples...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the temporary closure of all museums in the UK, closing buildings and suspending all on-site activities. Museum agencies aim at mitigating and managing these impacts on the sector, in a context of chronic data scarcity. “Museums in the Pandemic” is an interdisciplinary project that utilises content scraped from museums’...

Extracting rich contextual information from study participants presents an interesting challenge when the expected results are uncertain. This article presents the design of a contextual geographic information system (GIS) to extract platial information from a multimodal data set (audio, video, and GPS) collected during a 'think-aloud' leisure walk...

Leisure walking has known benefits to public health, from both physical and psychological viewpoints. Complementing traditional print information sources, dedicated online platforms and apps provide tools to search, discover, plan, and share routes. While walking routes are highly heterogeneous in terms of their properties and geographical context,...

Online food delivery services facilitate access to unhealthy foods and have proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explores associations between neighbourhood deprivation and exposure to online food delivery services and changes in exposure by deprivation during the first year of the pandemic. Data on food outlets delivering to 661 p...

Background Evidence for an association between the local food environment, diet and diet-related disease is mixed, particularly in the UK. One reason may be the use of more distal outcomes such as weight status and cardiovascular disease, rather than more proximal outcomes such as food purchasing. This study explores associations between food envir...

Providing routes to leisure walkers requires alternative recommendation scenarios to those used in tourism routing systems. In this paper, we present an emerging conceptual model of three scenarios for curating leisure walking route recommendations. Our recommendation scenarios consider the highest ranked similar walks, routes for new application u...

Providing recommendations for interesting and engaging leisure walking routes is a complex problem due to the subjective and personal nature of the activity. Existing work has often focused on recommending the quickest or most popular walks. However, these routes often lack detail on the contextual and experiential factors of walks and do not attem...

Background Exposure to a poor-quality food environment is thought to influence diet-related behavioural and health outcomes, but evidence is mixed. Better evidence may be generated by exploring associations with more proximal outcomes, such as food purchasing. This study explores associations between food environment exposures household take-home a...

Films are deeply geographical. Externally, they are produced in places, across increasingly complex and shifting global networks that connect organisations, cities, professionals, and equipment. Internally, their imagined geographies are set in either real or fictional places, and refer to their social, political, and cultural facets. In this study...

This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on content moderation by focusing on its practice in relation to localized social media contexts, an area which remains under-researched. It makes two key contributions. Firstly, it presents the results of a study on moderation practices in relation to place-named Facebook groups across Greater Lo...

Urban litter, such as cans, packaging, and cigarettes, has significant impacts, and yet little is known about its spatio‐temporal distribution, with little available data. In contexts of data scarcity, crowdsourcing provides a low‐cost approach to collecting a large amount of geo‐referenced data. We consider 1.7 million litter observations in the N...

Citizen consumption refers to the goods and services which citizens utilise. This includes time spent on leisure and cultural activities as well as the consumption of necessary and luxury goods and services. The spatial dimension of consumption inequality can show the underlying urban spatial structure and processes of a city. Usually, the main bar...

Search engines make information about places available to billions of users, who explore geographic information for a variety of purposes. The aggregated, large-scale search behavioural statistics provided by Google Trends can provide new knowledge about the spatial and temporal variation in interest in places. Such search data can provide useful k...

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the area of Participatory GIS (PGIS) has generated numerous interactive mapping tools to support complex planning processes. The need to involve non-expert users makes the usability of these tools a crucial aspect that contributes to their success or failure. While many approaches and procedures have been proposed...

Several studies have highlighted the absence of an integrated comprehensive dataset covering all of the UK’s museums, hence impeding research into the emergence, evolution, and wider impact of the UK’s museums sector. “Mapping Museums” is an interdisciplinary project aiming to develop a comprehensive database of UK museums in existence since 1960,...

Online representations of places are becoming pivotal in informing our understanding of urban life. Content production on online platforms is grounded in the geography of their users and their digital infrastructure. These constraints shape place representation, that is the amount, quality, and type of digital information available in a geographic...

Several studies have highlighted the absence of an integrated comprehensive dataset covering all of the UK's museums, hence impeding research into the emergence, evolution and wider impact of the UK's museums sector. "Mapping Museums" is an interdisciplinary project aiming to develop a comprehensive database of UK museums in existence since 1960, a...

Digital maps are ubiquitous, supporting countless online activities. Most interactive mapping platforms support three user operations to move across space: zooming in, zooming out, and panning. While using interactive maps, it is common for users to land in an unfamiliar area at high zoom levels. To understand the location of the area, users zoom o...

The primary objective of this research is to understand the relationship between the positivity of user-generated content, namely Airbnb reviews and the “attractiveness” of the neighbourhood of the listing. Focussing on London wards and their Airbnb listings, we could identify some features which consistently signal positive sentiment and used best...

Surveys of the UK museum sector have all had subtly different remits and so represent the sector in a variety of ways. In the last three decades, surveys have almost invariably focused on accredited institutions, thereby omitting almost half of the museums in the UK. In this article we examine how data collection became tied to the accreditation sc...

Search engines make information about places available to billions of users, who explore geographic information for a variety of purposes. The aggregated, large-scale search behavioural statistics provided by Google Trends can provide new knowledge about the spatial and temporal variation in interest in places. Such search data can provide useful k...

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the area of Participatory GIS (PGIS) has generated numerous interactive mapping tools to support complex planning processes. The need to involve non-expert users makes the usability of these tools a crucial aspect that contributes to their success or failure. While many approaches and procedures have been proposed...

Location based querying is the core interaction paradigm between mobile citizens and the Internet of Things, so providing users with intelligent web-services that interact efficiently with web and wireless devices to recommend personalised services is a key goal. With today's popular Web Map Services, users can ask for general information at a spec...

Ideal types have received less attention than membership criteria in the ethnicity and nationalism literature. This article uses crowdsourced genealogical data and onomastics software to show that British Isles surnames and ancestry remain overrepresented among American actors, especially in roles connected with the national narrative. Conformity t...

The communication of data uncertainty is a crucial problem in data science, information visualization, and geographic information science (GIScience). Effective ways to communicate the uncertainty of data enables data consumers to interpret the data as intended by the producer, reducing the possibilities of misinterpretation. In this article, we re...

Wikimapia is a major privately-owned volunteered geographic information (VGI) project to collect information about places. Over the past ten years, Wikimapia has attracted hundreds of thousands of contributors and collected millions of data points, including towns, restaurants, lakes, and tourist attractions (http://wikimapia.org). Unlike OpenStree...

Geographic information has become central for data scientists of many disciplines to put their analyses into a spatio-temporal perspective. However, just as the volume and variety of data sources on the Web grow, it becomes increasingly harder for analysts to be familiar with all the available geospatial tools, including toolboxes in Geographic Inf...

Every day, practitioners, researchers, and students consult the Web to meet their information needs about GIS concepts and tools. How do we improve GIS in terms of conceptual organisation, findability, interoperability and relevance for user needs? So far, efforts have been mainly top-down, overlooking the actual usage of software and tools. In thi...

Crowdsourcing platforms and social media produce distinctive geographies of informational content. The production process is enabled and influenced by a variety of socio-economic and demographic factors, shaping the place representation, i.e., the amount and type of information available in an area. In this study, we explore and explain the geograp...

Crowdsourcing platforms and social media produce distinctive geographies of informational content. The production process is enabled and influenced by a variety of socio-economic and demographic factors, shaping the place representation, i.e., the amount and type of information available in an area. In this study, we explore and explain the geograp...

Every day, practitioners, researchers, and students consult the Web to meet their information needs about GIS concepts and tools. How do we improve GIS in terms of conceptual organisation, findability, interoperability and relevance for user needs? So far, efforts have been mainly top-down, overlooking the actual usage of software and tools. In thi...

A partire dall'emergere della nozione di intelligenza artificiale (IA) negli anni 1950, il sogno di sviluppare una macchina pensante è stato al centro di numerosi fallimenti e altrettante rinascite. Mentre alcuni informatici, scienziati e filosofi si sono sforzati di dimostrare l’impossibilità di una IA equivalente o superiore alla mente umana, alt...

This article discusses the role of technological myths in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies from 1950s to the early 1970s. It shows how the rise of AI was accompanied by the construction of a powerful cultural myth: The creation of a thinking machine, which would be able to perfectly simulate the cognitive faculties of th...

This article discusses the role of technological myths in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies from 1950s to the early 1970s. It shows how the rise of AI was accompanied by the construction of a powerful cultural myth: the creation of a thinking machine, which would be able to perfectly simulate the cognitive faculties of th...

Knowing where people live is crucial to provide timely and effective relief in humanitarian crises. To date, the population distribution in vulnerable parts of the developing world is insufficiently mapped, particularly in low population density areas. Based on work in the Missing Maps project, we propose a method to obtain cheap estimates of the p...

In Geographic Information Systems (GIS), geoprocessing workflows allow analysts to organize their methods on spatial data in complex chains. We propose a method for expressing workflows as linked data, and for semi-automatically enriching them with semantics on the level of their operations and datasets. Linked workflows can be easily published on...

Searching for information is a ubiquitous activity, performed in a variety of contexts and supported by rapidly evolving technologies. As a process, information search often has a spatial aspect: spatial metaphors help users refer to abstract contents, and geo-referenced information grounds entities in physical space. While information search is a...

Street names provide important insights into the local culture, history, and politics of places. Linked open data provide a wealth of knowledge that can be associated with street names, enabling novel ways to explore cultural geographies. This paper presents a three-fold contribution. We present (1) a technique to establish a correspondence between...

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) support spatial problem solving by large repositories of procedures, which are mainly operating on map layers. These procedures and their parameters are often not easy to understand and use, especially not for domain experts without extensive GIS training. This hinders a wider adoption of mapping and spatial ana...

The computational representation of place is one of the key research areas for the advancement of geographic information science (GIScience), bridging the gap between place-based human cognition and experience, and space-centered information systems. While many conceptual schemas, vocabularies and ontologies contain some notion of place, the concep...

Vast swaths of geographic information are produced by non-professional contributors using online collaborative tools. To extract value from the data, creators and consumers alike need some degree of consensus about what the entities of their domain of interest are and how they are related. Traditional information communities, such as government age...

The assessment of the quality of volunteered geographic information (VGI) is cornerstone to understand the fitness for purpose of datasets in many application domains. While most analyses focus on geometric and positional quality, only sporadic attention has been devoted to the interpretation of the data, i.e., the communication process through whi...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) evaluates the environmental impact of a product through its entire life cycle, from material extraction to final disposal or recycling. The environmental impacts of an activity depend on both the ac-tivity's direct emissions to the environment as well as indirect emissions caused by activities elsewhere in the supply cha...

We propose to include the perspective of spatial computing in interdisciplinary courses on spatial thinking. Specifically, we recommend developing and applying a set of spatial lenses through which learners of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) get to see geographic space and choose spatial computations. These lenses are based on the core concept...

In crowdsourced cartographic projects, mappers coordinate their efforts through online tools to produce digital geospatial artefacts, such as maps and gazetteers, which were once the exclusive territory of professional surveyors and cartographers. In order to produce meaningful and coherent data, contributors need to negotiate a shared conceptualis...

Search engine results influence the visibility of different viewpoints in political, cultural, and scientific debates. Treating search engines as editorial products with intrinsic biases can help understand the structure of information flows in new media. This paper outlines an empirical methodology to analyze the representation of topics in search...

Graphs have become ubiquitous structures to encode geographic knowledge online. The Semantic Web's linked open data, folksonomies, wiki websites and open gazetteers can be seen as geo-knowledge graphs, that is labeled graphs whose vertices represent geographic concepts and whose edges encode the relations between concepts. To compute the semantic s...

The recent emergence of e-readers and electronic books (e-books) has brought the death of the book to the centre of current debates on new media. In this article, we analyse alternative narratives that surround the possibility of the disappearance of print books, dominated by fetishism, fears about the end of humanism and ideas of techno-fundamenta...

Personal GeoServices are emerging as an interaction paradigm linking users to information rich environments like a university campus or to Big Data sources like the Internet of Things by delivering spatially intelligent web-services. OpenStreetMap (OSM) constitutes a valuable source of spatial base-data that can be extracted, integrated, and utilis...

One of the main reasons why software projects fail is the lack of communication between the business users, who actually know the problem domain, and the developers who design and implement the software model. " (Ghosh 2011). Abstract We present the design rationale underlying a language for spatial computing and sketch a prototypical implementatio...

This specialist meeting on the theme of spatial search provided a platform for exploring research frontiers at the interface of computer science, cognitive science, and other disciplines, especially in the context of geographically referenced information. This report reviews the discussions among 36 experts from academia and industry over two days,...

E-recruitment uses a range of web-based technologies to find, evaluate, and hire new personnel for organizations. A crucial challenge in this arena lies in the categorization of job o↵ers: candidates and operators often explore and analyze large numbers of o↵ers and profiles through a set of job categories. To date, recruitment organizations define...

Place is a central category in the human experience. Across cultures, individuals describe experiences, express opinions, narrate stories set in and about places. The web provides a large, dynamic corpus of documents describing places from a myriad of viewpoints. Emotions and their expression play an important role in these representations of place...

Daring predictions of the proximate future can establish shared discursive frameworks, mobilize capital, and steer complex processes. Among the prophetic visions that encouraged and accompanied the development of new communication technologies was the "Digital Earth," described in a 1998 speech by Al Gore as a high-resolution representation of the...

The linked open data (LOD) paradigm has emerged as a promising approach to structuring and sharing geospatial information. One of the major obstacles to this vision lies in the difficulties found in the automatic integration between heterogeneous vocabularies and ontologies that provides the semantic backbone of the growing constellation of open ge...

In geographic information science and semantics, the computation of semantic similarity is widely recognised as key to supporting a vast number of tasks in information integration and retrieval. By contrast, the role of geo-semantic relatedness has been largely ignored. In natural language processing, semantic relatedness is often confused with the...

Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based information retrieval has become a prominent appr...

Computational measures of semantic similarity between geographic terms provide valuable support across geographic information retrieval, data mining, and information integration. To date, a wide variety of approaches to geo-semantic similarity have been devised. A judgment of similarity is not intrinsically right or wrong, but obtains a certain deg...

This article examines the role of discourses about new media technology and the web in the rise of the 5-Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S) in Italy. Founded by comedian and activist Beppe Grillo and web entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio in 2009, this movement succeeded in becoming the second largest party at the 2013 national elections i...

The convergence of Earth-observing media, web technologies, and cheap, portable devices has resulted in an explosion of geographic information. Although powerful, the "geographic information universe" metaphor obfuscates the deeply social and political nature of the socio-technical systems in which the flood of geographic information is produced an...

A growing corpus of online informal reviews is generated every day by non-experts, on social networks and blogs, about an unlimited range of products and services. Users do not only express holistic opinions, but often focus on specific features of their interest. The automatic understanding of “what people think” at the feature level can greatly s...

In recent years a web phenomenon known as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has produced large crowdsourced geographic datasets. Open- StreetMap (OSM), the leading VGI project, aims at building an open-content world map through user contributions. OSM semantics consists of a set of proper- ties (called 'tags') describing geographic classes,...

Volunteered geographic information VGI is generated by heterogenous ‘information communities’ that co-operate to produce reusable units of geographic knowledge. A consensual lexicon is a key factor to enable this open production model. Lexical definitions help demarcate the boundaries of terms, forming a thin semantic ground on which knowledge can...

In recent years, the open data (LOD) paradigm has emerged as a promising approach to structuring, publishing, and sharing data online, using Semantic Web standards. From a geospatial perspective, one of the key challenges consists of bridging the gap between the vast amount of crowdsourced, semi-structured or unstructured geo-information and the Se...

A cognitively plausible measure of semantic similarity between geographic concepts is valuable across several areas, including geographic information retrieval, data mining, and ontology alignment. Semantic similarity measures are not intrinsically right or wrong, but obtain a certain degree of cognitive plausibility in the context of a given appli...

In recent years, geographic information has entered the main-stream, deeply altering the pre-existing patterns of its production, dis-tribution, and consumption. Through web mapping, millions of online users utilise spatial data in interactive digital maps. The typical unit of visualisation of geo-data is a viewport, defined as a bi-dimensional ima...