How do you draw a map of 100,000 places, of more than a million flows of people, of changes over time and space, of different kinds of spaces, surfaces and volumes, from human travel time to landscapes of hopes, fears, migration, manufacturing and mortality? How do you turn the millions of numbers concerning some of the most important moments of our lives into images that allow us to appreciate the aggregate while still remembering the detail? The visualization of spatial social structure means, literally, making visible the geographical patterns to the way our lives have come to be s.

Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency of Great Britain, is investigating how semantic web technologies assist its role as a geographical information provider. A major part of this work involves the development of prototype products and datasets in RDF. This article discusses the production of an example dataset for the administrative geography of Great Britain, demonstrating the advantages of explicitly encoding topological relations between geographic entities over traditional spatial queries. We also outline how these data can be linked to other datasets on the web of linked data and some of the challenges that this raises.

A bibliometric analysis was applied in this work to evaluate global scientific production of geographic information system (GIS) papers from 1997 to 2006 in any journal of all the subject categories of the Science Citation Index compiled by Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Philadelphia, USA. ‘GIS’ and ‘geographic information system’ were used as keywords to search parts of titles, abstracts, or keywords. The published output analysis showed that GIS research steadily increased over the past 10 years and the annual paper production in 2006 was about three times 1997s paper production. There are clear distinctions among author keywords used in publications from the five most productive countries (USA, UK, Canada, Germany and China) in GIS research. Bibliometric methods could quantitatively characterize the development of global scientific production in a specific research field. The analytical results eventually provide several key findings.

In recent months there has been an explosion of interest in using the Web to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic information provided voluntarily by individuals. Sites such as Wikimapia and OpenStreetMap are empowering citizens to createa global patchwork of geographic information, while Google Earth and other virtual globes are encouraging volunteers to developinteresting applications using their own data. I review this phenomenon, and examine associated issues: what drives peopleto do this, how accurate are the results, will they threaten individual privacy, and how can they augment more conventionalsources? I compare this new phenomenon to more traditional citizen science and the role of the amateur in geographic observation.