GEOG281: The World & Big Data

This course introduces relevant concepts (e.g., 5 V’s) and techniques (e.g., cloud computing) of big (spatial) data as well as its applications in the real word, such as delineating communities using social media data and responding to disasters with volunteered geographic information (VGI). The students will have hands-on experiences such as contributing VGI (e.g., creating and uploading geographic information to Open Street Map), retrieving social media data associated with location (e.g., “geo-tagged” Tweets), operating relational database management system (RDMS) and NoSQL databases, and visualizing big spatial datasets.