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)

Development of Distributed Research Center for analysis of regional climatic and environmental changes

We present an approach and first results of a collaborative project being carried out by a joint team of researchers from the Institute of Monitoring of Climatic and Ecological Systems, Russia and Earth Systems Research Center UNH, USA. Its main objective is development of a hardware and software platform prototype of a Distributed Research Center (DRC) for monitoring and projecting of regional climatic and environmental changes in the Northern extratropical areas. The DRC should provide the specialists working in climate related sciences and decision-makers with accurate and detailed climatic characteristics for the selected area and reliable and affordable tools for their in-depth statistical analysis and studies of the effects of climate change. Within the framework of the project, new approaches to cloud processing and analysis of large geospatial datasets (big geospatial data) inherent to climate change studies are developed and deployed on technical platforms of both institutions. We discuss here the state of the art in this domain, describe web based information-computational systems developed by the partners, justify the methods chosen to reach the project goal, and briefly list the results obtained so far

Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

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

IHO S-100: The New Hydrographic Geospatial Standard for Marine Data and Information

The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) is an intergovernmental consultative and technical organization established in 1921 to support the safety of navigation, and to contribute to the protection of the marine environment. One of its primary roles is to establish and maintain appropriate standards to assist in the proper and efficient use of hydrographic data and information. This paper describes the new IHO Geospatial Standard for Hydrographic Data to be known as S-100, together with the Geospatial Information Infrastructure (GII) that is in the course of development and implementation by the IHO. In both cases, details have yet to be finalised – for example, the first draft of S-100 – IHO Geospatial Standard for Hydrographic Data was only released for stakeholder comment in March 2008 and S-100 is not expected to be an active standard until at least 2009 or 2010. Nevertheless, the concepts and supporting organisational framework behind the GII are already beginning to take shape. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to what is happening and thereby promote comment and the active involvement of both existing and potential stakeholders in the development and implementation of both the IHO GII and S-100

Application of Geographical Information System in Animal Disease Surveillance and Control: A Review

Animal disease patterns are changing because of climate change and there is a continuous occurrence of re-emerging and emerging types of diseases. So, new and modern tools are essential for monitoring and surveillance of these diseases. This review was done to give an insight on the applications of GIS in animal disease surveillance, reporting and control. Geographic information systems (GIS) provide the easy access, utilization and manipulation of geospatial information. The advantage of GIS is mapping the many different locations of farms and other facilities with animals on a single map which helps in better monitoring and surveillance. GIS also provides detailed information on disease forecasting, prediction of outbreaks, identification of disease clusters or hotspot, creation of buffer zones and to evaluate different strategies to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Moreover, it provides an ideal condition for the collection of disease related data and their analyses in relation to population distribution, surrounding social and health services and the natural environmental conditions. Keywords: Animal diseases; Control; GIS; Surveillanc

GIS in the cloud: implementing a web map service on Google App Engine

Many producers of geographic information are now disseminating their data using open web service protocols, notably those published by the Open Geospatial Consortium. There are many challenges inherent in running robust and reliable services at reasonable cost. Cloud computing provides a new kind of scalable infrastructure that could address many of these challenges. In this study we implement a Web Map Service for raster imagery within the Google App Engine environment. We discuss the challenges of developing GIS applications within this framework and the performance characteristics of the implementation. Results show that the application scales well to multiple simultaneous users and performance will be adequate for many applications, although concerns remain over issues such as latency spikes. We discuss the feasibility of implementing services within the free usage quotas of Google App Engine and the possibility of extending the approaches in this paper to other GIS applications

Artificial neural networks in geospatial analysis

Artificial neural networks are computational models widely used in geospatial analysis for data classification, change detection, clustering, function approximation, and forecasting or prediction. There are many types of neural networks based on learning paradigm and network architectures. Their use is expected to grow with increasing availability of massive data from remote sensing and mobile platforms