Agile 2017 Students Workshops

One of our students, Ditsuhi Iskandaryan, had a paper accepted at one of the Agile 2017 workshops, and went to the Netherlands to present her work. Read her experience below:

I had an opportunity to participate and present in Agile 2017 conference (Wageningen 9-12 May, The Netherlands). It is an annual conference on Geographical Information Science. The theme of the conference for this year was ‘Societal Geo-Innovation’ which was aimed at contributing to the first 5 goals among the 17 sustainable development goals set by United Nations. In line with the theme of the conference, I presented my work on Open Data and Disaster Management. There has been a surge of attention on Open data recognizing its potential to add transparency in many disciplines as well as play a vital role in disaster management. I had a very productive time in the conference as I got an opportunity to get exposure to new developments in GI science as well as meet experts from different countries. I am sure this workshop is one of the important steps of my career.

Another student, Raquel Martin-Pozuelo Ojalbo, also had a paper accepted at one of the Agile 2017 workshops, and went to the Netherlands to present her work. Read her experience below:

On 9^th of May I presented one paper called “Open Data of Crime: A review of Spanish Open Data Portals” in Wageningen, Netherlands. I present this paper within “Open data for Open Cities” workshop in theAgile 2017 conference.

It was a very good opportunity to show to all the Open Data Community the barriers that we can find if we are interested in work with crime data in Spain. Sometimes finding data, if experience is missing, is a bit hard, but is much harder when you need to use this data and sometimes the data is not exactly about crime. The data is not about crime reported by police but is the condemned crime with data extracted from courts. This data is not the same from the point of view of a criminologist and their analysis have different objectives.

We can find some more problems for example; the spatial data offered is not enough to do deep analysis, the rejection of your request of crime data because the hermetic of the police forces, the data protection existing without taking into account the spectrum of data. Some professionals that must deal daily with these data as criminologist or crime analysist do not have a special consideration or treatment distinct to other normal user or citizen. Also, the figure of these professionals in Spain already does not exist, and to give them a special access to crime data and creating new jobs and positions could be a benefit for the government policy and police forces because their knowledge of criminality.

The speech had a good welcome and created an interesting discussion between all the people present, trying to give ideas in order to find some solutions and eliminate the barriers that we, as professionals that need to use crime data, can face daily.