Visualisation as a Model. Overview on Communication Techniques in Transport and Urban Planning

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) changed the way planners present and operate with their projects. New visualisation tools have changed the ways projects and plans are presented and disseminated. However, the opportunities given by visualisation are not completely exploited in the professional practice. This is due to several bottlenecks which occur in the daily carrying out of activities. The paper is organised in three sections. The first one explains how visualisation can be an added value to the planning practice if it is organised and designed as a framework of information; conceiving the visualisation as a model, data can be managed and represented in order to provide information at different levels of expertise, allowing city plans to be analysed and understood before their realisation. The second section resumes the changes caused by the introduction of ICT within the daily practice; a comparison between pre-digital and digital approaches highlights current opportunities for implementing the communication values of plans and projects. The third part illustrates some examples of innovative visualisations in the urban and transport planning practice, showing a number of uses of visualisation to fit different purposes. The paper concludes this insight formulating the necessity for integrating the studies on visualisation coming from different disciplines into a scientific method that can be proposed as a guideline in building the images of urban and transport plans. This would be particularly useful for obtaining a more scientific approach in the choices of representation and visualisation of urban aspects

Visually querying object-oriented databases

Bibliography: pages 141-145.As database requirements increase, the ability to construct database queries efficiently becomes more important. The traditional means of querying a database is to write a textual query, such as writing in SQL to query a relational database. Visual query languages are an alternative means of querying a database; a visual query language can embody powerful query abstraction and user feedback techniques, thereby making them potentially easier to use. In this thesis, we develop a visual query system for ODMG-compliant object-oriented databases, called QUIVER. QUIVER has a comprehensive expressive power; apart from supporting data types such as sets, bags, arrays, lists, tuples, objects and relationships, it supports aggregate functions, methods and sub-queries. The language is also consistent, as constructs with similar functionality have similar visual representations. QUIVER uses the DOT layout engine to automatically layout a query; QUIVER queries are easily constructed, as the system does not constrain the spatial arrangement of query items. QUIVER also supports a query library, allowing queries to be saved, retrieved and shared among users. A substantial part of the design has been implemented using the ODMG-compliant database system O₂, and the usability of the interface as well as the query language itself is presented. Visual queries are translated to OQL, the standard query language proposed by the ODMG, and query answers are presented using O₂ Look. During the course of our investigation, we conducted a user evaluation to compare QUIVER and OQL. The results were extremely encouraging in favour of QUIVER

Validation and Completion of Initial Data of Hydrocarbon Reservoirs Development Based on 3D Models

The validation of initial data is an important process to reduce the risk of errors in calculations. The large amount of heterogeneous data in the area of hydrocarbon reservoirs development leads to a significant increasing in complexity and calculation time of data validation. Here, we consider the problem of validation and completion of the initial data for the task of hydrocarbon reservoirs development. A validation and completion method, based on the use of 3D visual models and searching of analogies, is proposed. The results of testing the proposed method on the data of reservoirs of the Tomsk region of the Russian Federation are shown. The results showed that the time of the procedure of validation and completion of the initial data was reduced by 22.2% for projects of reserve calculation and by 32.2% for projects of development forecast in comparison with standard manual validation procedure. During the validation, experts identified 18% and 13.5% more errors with the proposed method for projects of reserve calculation and development forecast, respectively, showing that the proposed method could be an effective tool for data validation and completion

Curated Databases in the Life Sciences: The Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Project

This case study scopes and assesses the data curation aspects of the Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Project (EMAP), a programme funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC). The principal goal for EMAP is to develop an expression summary for each gene in the mouse embryo, which collectively has been named the Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Gene-Expression Database (EMAGE)

Justice Data Warehouse Assessment, Summary Report, February 13, 1998

This report is based on information provided from discussions with the Division of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Planning, members of the project's "Planning Group," and members of the Iowa Court Information System staff