A Prototype Toolkit For Evaluating Indoor Environmental Quality In Commercial Buildings

Measurement of building environmental parameters is often complex, expensive, and not easily proceduralized in a manner that covers all commercial buildings. Evaluating building indoor environmental quality performance is therefore not standard practice. This project developed a prototype toolkit that addressed existing barriers to widespread indoor environmental quality performance evaluation. A toolkit with both hardware and software elements was designed for practitioners around the indoor environmental quality requirements of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers / Chartered Institution of Building Services / United States Green Building Council Performance Measurement Protocols. This unique toolkit was built on a wireless mesh network with a web-based data collection, analysis, and reporting application. The toolkit provided a fast, robust deployment of sensors, real-time data analysis, Performance Measurement Protocol-based analysis methods and a scorecard and report generation tools. A web-enabled Geographic Information System-based metadata collection system also reduced field-study deployment time. The toolkit was evaluated through three case studies, which were discussed in this report

Using web GIS to promote stakeholder understanding of scientific results in sustainable urban development: A case study in Bergen, Norway

This paper highlights the importance of improving stakeholder understanding of environmental factors such as air quality and the urban heat island effect to achieve sustainable development goals. While accurate spatial and temporal environmental data are critical for sustainable solutions, the challenge lies in translating complex environmental information for non-specialists. To solve this problem, we propose using web GIS storytelling as a powerful tool for communicating and disseminating information about the environment. This paper aims to show example of implementation of a web-based geographic information system (GIS) on our case study in Bergen, Norway. This platform “Web GIS Bergen, air quality and thermal comfort” was created as an open portal. This document explains the components of the platform, their rationale, and implementation, which includes important steps. They involve the collection of relevant environmental data, including modeling results and remote sensing data. Futhermore, the design and interface of the platform has been carefully considered to provide a user-friendly experience based on interactive maps and storytelling. Combining data visualization and storytelling, the platform promotes a comprehensive understanding of complex environmental data, including “invisible killers” such as air pollution and the urban heat island effect, which significantly affect sustainable development. The strategic integration of this web-based GIS platform in Bergen can serve as an attractive model for other urban areas looking for practical tools for sustainable development, engaging stakeholders for a healthier and more sustainable urban future

Creating a Public Space for Georeferencing Sanborn Maps: A Louisiana Case Study

As institutional archives digitize their historical map collections and make them publicly available online, new methods for engaging with these materials emerge. Georeferencing the maps transforms their content from static images to dynamic map overlays, and allows for the extraction of geographic data like building footprints or place name coordinates. Many organizations have turned to crowdsourcing to georeference their large holdings, and this thesis approaches crowdsourced georeferencing from the perspective of participatory heritage, taking much inspiration from the idea of the archival commons. To test these ideas, a new extension was created for GeoNode—an open source geospatial content management system—that allows users to georeference map documents in a web browser. Further augmentation facilitated direct ingestion of digital content from the Library of Congress Sanborn Map collection, and a pilot project was conducted to engage the public in georeferencing maps of towns and cities across Louisiana. By the end of the project, 66 participants—from within Louisiana and without—had georeferenced all or a portion of 267 different Sanborn map volumes, creating over 1,500 new layers. These layers combine to create mosaics of 138 different communities across the state, including comprehensive coverage of the city of New Orleans in the years between 1885 and 1893—an especially valuable dataset in its own right. Seamless mosaics will be made from these layers and published via the LSU Atlas data portal for long-term public access. This experience led to new ideas for how to better engage citizens with historical maps of their communities, while the underlying construction of the georeferencing system itself provided insight into how users participated in the work. Ultimately, this thesis lays a conceptual foundation for future efforts of a similar nature, whether they pursue exactly the same technological approach or not

Access beyond geographic accessibility: understanding opportunities to human needs in a physical-virtual world

Access to basic human needs, such as food and healthcare, is conceptually understood to be comprised of multiple spatial and aspatial dimensions. However, research in this area has traditionally been explored with spatial accessibility measures that almost exclusively focus on just two dimensions. Namely, the availability of resources, services, and facilities, and the accessibility or ease to which locations of these opportunities can be reached with existing land-use and transport systems under temporal constraints and considering individual characteristics of people. These calculated measures are insufficient in holistically capturing available opportunities as they ignore other components, such as the emergence of virtual space to carry out activities and interactions enabled by modern information and communication technologies (ICT). Human dynamics today exist in a hybrid physical-virtual space, and recent research has highlighted the importance of understanding ICT, individual behavior, local context, social relations, and human perceptions in identifying opportunities available to people. However, there lacks a holistic approach that relates these different aspects to access research. This dissertation addresses this gap by proposing a new conceptual framework for the geography of access for various kinds of human needs, using food access as a case study to illustrate how the proposed framework can be applied to address critical societal issues. An interactive multispace geographic information system (GIS) web application is developed to better understand and visualize individual potential food access based on the conceptual framework. This dissertation contributes to the body of research with a proposed conceptual framework of access in a hybrid physical-virtual world, integration of various big and small data sources to reveal information relating to the access of people, and novel development of a multi-space GIS to analyze and visualize access to opportunities

Outside the Frame: Mapping and Urban Space in the United States, c. 1920-2014

In this thesis, I will focus on the way in which maps have developed and been used in or by the United States, specifically government and academic institutions, in the past century to create, control, and shape urban space. I will make use of formal analysis and historical context to examine three case studies in which “conventional” maps, meaning institutional (namely, government and academic) cartography, have been used, and, it will be argued, misused, to selectively include and exclude information and collectively shape our environment. Additionally, this thesis will follow chronologically alongside the simultaneous development and refinement of mapping technologies, focusing on how these advancements in technology were fueled by, and subsequently fed into, certain understandings of the production of space. In order, the case studies I examine are the Home Owners\u27 Loan Corporation (HOLC) and Federal Housing Association (FHA) redlining maps of Philadelphia, military mappings and the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and the Million-Dollar Blocks project by Columbia\u27s Spatial Information Design Lab. I am investigating what – meaning what people, narratives, and experiences – is left outside of the frame of the map and to what effect. Keywords: mapping, critical cartography, GIS, Philadelphia, incarceration, urban space

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio