BACKGROUND Cryptococcusgattii infections are being reported in the United States (US) with increasing frequency. Initially, US reports were primarily associated with an ongoing C. gattii outbreak in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) states of Washington and Oregon, starting in 2004. However, reports of C. gattii infections in patients from other US states have been increasing since 2009. Whether this...

Within the framework of Web Mapping 2.0 applications, the most striking example of a geographical application is the OpenStreetMap project. OpenStreetMap aims to create a free digital map of the world and is implemented through the engagement of participants in a mode similar to software development in Open Source projects. The information is collected by many participants, collated on a centra...

With the development of Web2.0 and mobile Internet, urban residents, a new type “sensor”, provide us with massive amounts volunteered geographic information (VGI). Quantifying spatial patterns VGI plays an increasingly important role in understanding functions. Using social media activity data, this article developed method to automatically extract identify functional zones. The is put forward ...

Over the last decade, volunteered geographic information (VGI) has become established as one of the most relevant geographic data sources in terms of worldwide coverage, representation of local knowledge and open data policies. Beside the data itself, data about community activity provides valuable insights into the mapping progress which can be useful for estimating data quality, understanding...

Volunteer geographical information (VGI), either in the context of citizen science or the mining of social media, has proven to be useful in various domains including natural hazards, health status, disease epidemics, and biological monitoring. Nonetheless, the variable or unknown data quality due to crowdsourcing settings are still an obstacle for fully integrating these data sources in enviro...