Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services

One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS). WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and performed distributed performance monitoring of these services. This paper explicates a distributed monitoring framework that was used to monitor 46,296 WMSs continuously for over one year and a crawling method to discover these WMSs. We analyzed server locations, provider types, themes, the spatiotemporal coverage of map layers and the service versions for 41,703 valid WMSs. Furthermore, we appraised the stability and performance of basic operations for 1210 selected WMSs (i.e., GetCapabilities and GetMap). We discuss the major reasons for request errors and performance issues, as well as the relationship between service response times and the spatiotemporal distribution of client monitoring sites. This paper will help service providers, end users and developers of standards to grasp the status of global WMS resources, as well as to understand the adoption status of OGC standards. The conclusions drawn in this paper can benefit geospatial resource discovery, service performance evaluation and guide service performance improvements.Comment: 24 pages; 15 figure

Seafloor characterization using airborne hyperspectral co-registration procedures independent from attitude and positioning sensors

The advance of remote-sensing technology and data-storage capabilities has progressed in the last decade to commercial multi-sensor data collection. There is a constant need to characterize, quantify and monitor the coastal areas for habitat research and coastal management. In this paper, we present work on seafloor characterization that uses hyperspectral imagery (HSI). The HSI data allows the operator to extend seafloor characterization from multibeam backscatter towards land and thus creates a seamless ocean-to-land characterization of the littoral zone

Hydrological Models as Web Services: An Implementation using OGC Standards

<p>Presentation for the HIC 2012 - 10th International Conference on Hydroinformatics. "Understanding Changing Climate and Environment and Finding Solutions" Hamburg, Germany July 14-18, 2012</p> <p> </p

The application of data mining techniques to interrogate Western Australian water catchment data sets

Current environmental challenges such as increasing dry land salinity, waterlogging, eutrophication and high nutrient runoff in south western regions of Western Australia may have both cultural and environmental implications in the near future. Advances in computer science disciplines, more specifically, data mining techniques and geographic information services provide the means to be able to conduct longitudinal climate studies to predict changes in the Water catchment areas of Western Australia. The research proposes to utilise existing spatial data mining techniques in conjunction of modern open-source geospatial tools to interpret trends in Western Australian water catchment land use. This will be achieved through the development of a innovative data mining interrogation tool that measures and validates the effectiveness of data mining methods on a sample water catchment data set from the Peel Harvey region of WA. In doing so, the current and future statistical evaluation on potential dry land salinity trends can be eluded. The interrogation tool will incorporate different modern geospatial data mining techniques to discover meaningful and useful patterns specific to current agricultural problem domain of dry land salinity. Large GIS data sets of the water catchments on Peel-Harvey region have been collected by the state government Shared Land Information Platform in conjunction with the LandGate agency. The proposed tool will provide an interface for data analysis of water catchment data sets by benchmarking measures using the chosen data mining techniques, such as: classical statistical methods, cluster analysis and principal component analysis.The outcome of research will be to establish an innovative data mining instrument tool for interrogating salinity issues in water catchment in Western Australia, which provides a user friendly interface for use by government agencies, such as Department of Agriculture and Food of Western Australia researchers and other agricultural industry stakeholders

Developing an open data portal for the ESA climate change initiative

We introduce the rationale for, and architecture of, the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Open Data Portal (http://cci.esa.int/data/). The Open Data Portal hosts a set of richly diverse datasets – 13 “Essential Climate Variables” – from the CCI programme in a consistent and harmonised form and to provides a single point of access for the (>100 TB) data for broad dissemination to an international user community. These data have been produced by a range of different institutions and vary across both scientific and spatio-temporal characteristics. This heterogeneity of the data together with the range of services to be supported presented significant technical challenges. An iterative development methodology was key to tackling these challenges: the system developed exploits a workflow which takes data that conforms to the CCI data specification, ingests it into a managed archive and uses both manual and automatically generated metadata to support data discovery, browse, and delivery services. It utilises both Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) data nodes and the Open Geospatial Consortium Catalogue Service for the Web (OGC-CSW) interface, serving data into both the ESGF and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). A key part of the system is a new vocabulary server, populated with CCI specific terms and relationships which integrates OGC-CSW and ESGF search services together, developed as part of a dialogue between domain scientists and linked data specialists. These services have enabled the development of a unified user interface for graphical search and visualisation – the CCI Open Data Portal Web Presence

A Web GIS-based Integration of 3D Digital Models with Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage Exploration

This PhD project explores how geospatial semantic web concepts, 3D web-based visualisation, digital interactive map, and cloud computing concepts could be integrated to enhance digital cultural heritage exploration; to offer long-term archiving and dissemination of 3D digital cultural heritage models; to better interlink heterogeneous and sparse cultural heritage data. The research findings were disseminated via four peer-reviewed journal articles and a conference article presented at GISTAM 2020 conference (which received the ‘Best Student Paper Award’)

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

Semantic Gateway as a Service architecture for IoT Interoperability

The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to occupy a substantial component of future Internet. The IoT connects sensors and devices that record physical observations to applications and services of the Internet. As a successor to technologies such as RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the IoT has stumbled into vertical silos of proprietary systems, providing little or no interoperability with similar systems. As the IoT represents future state of the Internet, an intelligent and scalable architecture is required to provide connectivity between these silos, enabling discovery of physical sensors and interpretation of messages between things. This paper proposes a gateway and Semantic Web enabled IoT architecture to provide interoperability between systems using established communication and data standards. The Semantic Gateway as Service (SGS) allows translation between messaging protocols such as XMPP, CoAP and MQTT via a multi-protocol proxy architecture. Utilization of broadly accepted specifications such as W3C's Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology for semantic annotations of sensor data provide semantic interoperability between messages and support semantic reasoning to obtain higher-level actionable knowledge from low-level sensor data.Comment: 16 page