Historical collaborative geocoding

The latest developments in digital have provided large data sets that can increasingly easily be accessed and used. These data sets often contain indirect localisation information, such as historical addresses. Historical geocoding is the process of transforming the indirect localisation information to direct localisation that can be placed on a map, which enables spatial analysis and cross-referencing. Many efficient geocoders exist for current addresses, but they do not deal with the temporal aspect and are based on a strict hierarchy (..., city, street, house number) that is hard or impossible to use with historical data. Indeed historical data are full of uncertainties (temporal aspect, semantic aspect, spatial precision, confidence in historical source, ...) that can not be resolved, as there is no way to go back in time to check. We propose an open source, open data, extensible solution for geocoding that is based on the building of gazetteers composed of geohistorical objects extracted from historical topographical maps. Once the gazetteers are available, geocoding an historical address is a matter of finding the geohistorical object in the gazetteers that is the best match to the historical address. The matching criteriae are customisable and include several dimensions (fuzzy semantic, fuzzy temporal, scale, spatial precision ...). As the goal is to facilitate historical work, we also propose web-based user interfaces that help geocode (one address or batch mode) and display over current or historical topographical maps, so that they can be checked and collaboratively edited. The system is tested on Paris city for the 19-20th centuries, shows high returns rate and is fast enough to be used interactively.Comment: WORKING PAPE

A Conceptual Design of Spatio‐Temporal Agent‐ Based Model for Volcanic Evacuation

The understanding of evacuation processes is important for improving the effectiveness of evacuation plans in the event of volcanic disasters. In terms of social processes, the enactment of evacuations in volcanic crises depends on the variability of individual/household responses. This variability of population response is related to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the hazard characteristics of volcanoes—specifically, the exact moment at which the eruption occurs (temporal), the magnitude of the eruption and which locations are impacted (spatial). In order to provide enhanced evacuation planning, it is important to recognise the potential problems that emerge during evacuation processes due to such variability. Evacuation simulations are one approach to understanding these processes. However, experimenting with volcanic evacuations in the real world is risky and challenging, and so an agent‐based model is proposed to simulate volcanic evacuation. This paper highlights the literature gap for this topic and provides the conceptual design for a simulation using an agent‐based model. As an implementation, an initial evacuation model is presented for Mount Merapi in Indonesia, together with potential applications of the model for supporting volcanic evacuation management, discussion of the initial outcomes and suggestions for future work

Reconstructing the 1855 cholera epidemic in Basel using geographic information visualization

Diese Masterarbeit rekonstruiert die Choleraepidemie in Basel im Jahr 1855 mithilfe geographischer Visualisierungen. Anhand von Karten und Grafiken wurden die räumlichen und zeitlichen Muster des Choleraausbruchs sowie mögliche Einflussfak- toren wie Topographie, Flussläufe und Trinkwasserquellen analysiert. Die in dieser Arbeit verwendeten Daten bestehen aus historischen Archivquellen zu Cholerafällen, die digitalisiert und geokodiert wurden. Weitere historische und zeitgenössische Quellen wie Volkszählungsdaten aus den Jahren 1850 und 1860, his- torische Karten und Geodaten zu möglichen Einflussfaktoren wurden aufbereitet, um die Umstände der Choleraepidemie zu bestimmen. Die Daten wurden in einem geografischen Informationssystem erfasst und mit Hilfe von Karten und Diagrammen visualisiert. Insgesamt konnten 382 der 399 erfassten Cholerafälle den jeweiligen Adressen in der Stadt Basel zugeordnet werden. Die daraus resultierenden Karten zeigen eine Häufung von Cholerafällen im Kleinbasel, insbesondere an der Rheingasse in der Nähe eines Trinkwasserbrunnens. In Grossbasel traten die Fälle gehäuft vor allem im Birsig-Tal auf, während es in den höhergelegenen Teilen der Stadt weniger Fälle gab. Die Ergebnisse reihen sich ein in die aktuelle Choleraforschung, die verunreinigtes Trinkwasser, Höhenlage und Flussnähe als Risikofaktoren für die Ansteckung mit der Cholera einstuft. Mit dieser Digitalisierung und Aufbereitung der historischen Daten können weitere Forschungen durchgeführt werden, z.B. mit Hilfe von Raumanalyse und Statistik oder der Epidemiologie. This Master’s thesis reconstructs the cholera epidemic of Basel in the year 1855 by means of geographic information visualization. The spatial and spatio-temporal patterns of the cholera outbreak were analyzed using maps and graphs along with po- tential influencing factors such as topography, river courses, and sources of drinking water. The data used in this thesis consist of historical archive sources on cholera cases that were digitized and geocoded. Additional historical and contemporary sources such as census data from the years 1850 and 1860, historical maps, and geodata on possible influencing factors were processed to approximate the era of the cholera epidemic. The datasets were collected in a geographic information system and were explored and visualized using maps and graphs. In total, 382 of the 399 recorded cholera cases were assigned to their respective ad- dresses in the city of Basel. The resulting maps revealed cholera case accumulations in Kleinbasel, especially on Rheingasse street in the surroundings of a drinking water well. In Grossbasel, cases occurred in clusters mostly in the Birsig river valley with fewer cases in the more elevated parts of the city. The results stand in relation to contemporary cholera research classifying contami- nated drinking water, elevation, and river proximity as risk factors in the contraction of cholera (World Health Organization 2022, Luque Fernandez et al. 2012, X. Wang and Yang 2021). With this digitization and processing of the historical data, further research can be conducted, e.g. using spatial analysis and statistics, or epidemiology

eCAD System Design - Applications in Architecture

The rapid advances in learning technologies, computer modeling, multimedia and spatial sciences, as well as the availability of many powerful graphics PCs and workstations, make 3-D modeling-based methods for personalized e-learning with eCAD (modeling) functionality feasible. Personalized eCAD learning is a new term in engineering, environment and architecture education, related to the development of learning educational units (3-D learning objects) with re-usable digital architecture functionality, and introduced to literature for the first time within this paper. In particular, for university education courses in eCAD, digital architecture, design computing and CAAD (reagarding spatial information systems, architectures, monuments, cultural heritage sites, etc.), such a e-learning methodolgy must be able to derive spatial, pictorial, geometric, spatial, topological, learning and semantic information from the target object (a 3-D model) or scene (a 3-D landscape environment) or procedure (a 3-D simulation approach to a phenomenon), in such a way that it can be directly used for e-learning purposes regarding the spatial topology, the history, the architecture, the structure and the temporal (time-based) 3-D geometry of the projected object, scene or procedure. This paper is about the system design of such a e-learning method. For this purpose, the requirements, objectives and pedagogical extensions are presented and discussed. Finaly, a practical project is used to demonstrate the functionality and the performance of the proposed methodology in architectur

Interactive tools for the preservation, dissemination and study of silk heritage : an introduction to the SILKNOW Project

Silk was a major factor for progress in Europe, mostly along the Western Silk Road's network of production and market centers. The silk trade also allowed for the exchange of ideas and innovations, having impacts at economic, technical, functional, cultural and symbolic levels. However, silk has today become a seriously endangered heritage. Although many European specialized museums are devoted to its preservation, they usually lack the size and resources to take advantage of state-of-the-art digital technologies. The aim of this paper is twofold; firstly, we introduce SILKNOW, an interdisciplinary project that has been recently funded by the H2020 Programme of the European Union in order to preserve and promote the heritage of silk textiles; secondly, we introduce a set of interactive tools related to the projec

Geospatial Information Research: State of the Art, Case Studies and Future Perspectives

Geospatial information science (GI science) is concerned with the development and application of geodetic and information science methods for modeling, acquiring, sharing, managing, exploring, analyzing, synthesizing, visualizing, and evaluating data on spatio-temporal phenomena related to the Earth. As an interdisciplinary scientific discipline, it focuses on developing and adapting information technologies to understand processes on the Earth and human-place interactions, to detect and predict trends and patterns in the observed data, and to support decision making. The authors – members of DGK, the Geoinformatics division, as part of the Committee on Geodesy of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, representing geodetic research and university teaching in Germany – have prepared this paper as a means to point out future research questions and directions in geospatial information science. For the different facets of geospatial information science, the state of art is presented and underlined with mostly own case studies. The paper thus illustrates which contributions the German GI community makes and which research perspectives arise in geospatial information science. The paper further demonstrates that GI science, with its expertise in data acquisition and interpretation, information modeling and management, integration, decision support, visualization, and dissemination, can help solve many of the grand challenges facing society today and in the future

Proceedings of the 3rd Open Source Geospatial Research & Education Symposium OGRS 2014

The third Open Source Geospatial Research & Education Symposium (OGRS) was held in Helsinki, Finland, on 10 to 13 June 2014. The symposium was hosted and organized by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Aalto University School of Engineering, in partnership with the OGRS Community, on the Espoo campus of Aalto University. These proceedings contain the 20 papers presented at the symposium. OGRS is a meeting dedicated to exchanging ideas in and results from the development and use of open source geospatial software in both research and education.  The symposium offers several opportunities for discussing, learning, and presenting results, principles, methods and practices while supporting a primary theme: how to carry out research and educate academic students using, contributing to, and launching open source geospatial initiatives. Participating in open source initiatives can potentially boost innovation as a value creating process requiring joint collaborations between academia, foundations, associations, developer communities and industry. Additionally, open source software can improve the efficiency and impact of university education by introducing open and freely usable tools and research results to students, and encouraging them to get involved in projects. This may eventually lead to new community projects and businesses. The symposium contributes to the validation of the open source model in research and education in geoinformatics