Public Participation Geographic Information Systems Case Study

Public participation geographic information (PPGIS) systems provide a practical means to quantify often difficult to measure public perceptions such as place values and place attachment. Brown and Weber (2010) employ a public participation GIS method to assess the non-monetary landscapes values as perceived by the residents of Kangaroo Island, South Australia. The goal of the study is to ascertain the spatiotemporal variation in the meanings local people associate with a place to the way those values may change as places are developed and land-use changes.
Benson et al. (1998) suggest that geographic information systems provide a mode for identifying and analyzing such complex economic interconnections. The study focuses on a selection of 35 Arab settlements and their commercial practices resulting from industrialization driven enterprise growth in Israel. The purpose of the study is to demonstrate how GIS can be applied as a method for spatial analysis of existing economic network using ArcCAD and MapInfo GIS for visualization and statistical inquiry.
To conduct the study, the authors collected data for the study through surveying/interviewing the managers and owners of 514 commercial plants operating in 1992 asking for information regarding sources of inputs (raw materials), output (finished products for sale) destination, and other pertinent characteristics pertaining to the enterprise processes. They then created four vector layers, separating the data into the location of the plants (points), purchasing links for raw materials (lines), sales links for finished products (lines), and mobility of the local labor force (also
For example, most socio-economic data is stored in a vector format while environmental data tends to be represented using raster data (Huby et al., 2007, pg. 7). Further, Huby et al. (2007) analyze the possibility of reconciling the differences (specifically relating to scale) between such datasets through the integration of data infrastructures into a single, comprehensive data file. The research location is set in rural England. The aim of the study is to decipher the possibility of creating a dataset that merges social, economic, and physical or environmental data from multiple sources built on a carefully selected basic spatial unit or BSU (pg. 2). Further, they aspire to maintain a high spatial resolution as well as spatial accuracy of all the data while assimilating the various spatial scales. Another objective for the study is to highlight some of the issues that can arise during this process of data