Congratulations to Team Spatial Impact from NUS on clinching the Distinction Award at the ASEAN Geospatial Challenge 2025
- Post by: Kowin Chen
- July 23, 2025
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Team Spatial Impact consists of students from the MSc in Applied GIS programme at NUS, namely, DUONG QUANG HOANG THO, MAURITS ARIF FATHONI LUBIS, ZONG YUCHAO, RAFAEL KARTIKA JATI DEWANTORO.
You can watch SLA’s video on the project winners here.
We asked them a few questions about their project and here’s their answer!
- Could you give us a brief overview of the project?
It’s a project about parks and how people feel about using them. We use Google Maps reviews as a measure of park users’ sentiment and aim to analyze its correlation with park quality. For park quality, we use the Recreational Environment Quality Index (REQI), which is calculated using satellite image and park shapefiles. Then, we apply machine learning to calculate the sentiment score of each Google Maps review and use topic modeling to identify the main themes of the reviews. The results show a weak positive correlation between sentiment from Google Maps reviews and park quality as measured by REQI. In addition, we find that users tend to focus more on practical, tangible features related to comfort and usability (such as amenities, cleanliness, crowding, food availability, and outdoor activities) rather than green qualities. Interestingly, negative comments often highlight deficiencies in green aspects of the parks.
- What was the idea or inspiration behind this project?
All of us are new to living in Singapore, and most of us really enjoy the parks here. During our brainstorming session, we came up with the idea of researching park users’ sentiment toward parks in Singapore. Geographically, we wanted to explore the distribution of parks with positive and negative sentiment across the island and see if there are any noticeable patterns. In addition, from some of lectures and our professor’s publications, we learned about Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), which sparked our interest in integrating it into our project to capture user sentiment through publicly available data.
- What difficulties did the team face when doing this project?
One of the main difficulties we faced in this project was gathering data, especially for sentiment analysis. Initially, we wanted to use social media data from platforms like Instagram, X (Twitter), or other social media sources. However, many of these platforms no longer allow free access to their data and using them would require payment. Since we didn’t want to spend money to obtain the data, we started looking for alternative sources, which led us to using Google Maps Reviews instead.
- What has the team learnt throughout this journey from start to end?
Throughout this journey, we learned how to apply the skills we gained in class to conduct a research project. We used what we learned about VGI, machine learning, and remote sensing, and applied them directly in this project. The competition also gave us valuable experience in the later stages of research, especially in presenting our results to judges and the public. We even had the opportunity to present our findings at a conference in GeoConnect 2025 and discuss them with representatives from NParks, which was a great experience for us.
- Any shoutouts or special mentions for the support that people or organizations have given you?
We are very thankful for the support from our advisor, Asst. Prof. Luo Wei. He gave us valuable advice throughout the project from idea generation to methodology and beyond. We’re also grateful for the facilities provided by the NUS Geography Department, such as the ArcGIS Pro license and access to the GIS Lab, which we used to carry out our project.
Once again, congratulations to the students!