Citizens and society in general use and engage with EO services through mobile devices, social media platforms, apps. We do also categorize in this section the users in education, research and training providing knowledge and learning outcomes.
Active and engaged citizens are one of the main driving forces of EO/GI. Nowadays, there is a growing amount of location-based contents generated by connected “produsers”, mainly equipped with smartphones. The exponential growth of ambient geographic information through social networks became the basic feature of a spatially enabled society, in which it behaves as a vessel where millions of people share their current thoughts, observations and opinions, showing to provide more reliable and trustworthy information than traditional methods like questionnaires and other sources.
A spatially enabled citizen is explained through his ability to express, formalize, equip (technologically and cognitively), and (un)consciously activate an efficiently use of his spatial skills. Harvesting this ambient geospatial information provides a unique opportunity to gain valuable insight on information flow and social networking within a society, support a greater mapping, understand the human landscape and its evolution over time. With these insights, city planners can make use of the gathered affective data to detect positive or negative trends developing in the city, managing to take early countermeasures.
Nevertheless, assembling and analyzing EO/GI provide us with unparalleled insight on a broad variety of cultural, societal, and human factors, particularly as they relate to human and social dynamics, for example: 1) mapping the manner in which ideas and information propagate in a society, information that can be used to identify appropriate strategies for information dissemination during a crisis situation. 2) Mapping people’s opinions and reaction on specific topics and current events, thus improving our ability to collect precise cultural, political, economic and health data, and to do so at near real-time rates. 3) Identifying emerging socio-cultural hotspots.