Building City-Scale Walking Itineraries Using Large Geospatial Datasets

Nowadays, social networks play an important role in many aspects of people’s life and in traveling in particular. People share their experience and opinions not only on specialized sites, like TripAdvisor, but also in social networks, e.g. Instagram. Combining information from different sources we can get a manifold dataset, which covers main sights, famous buildings as well as places popular with city residents. In this paper, we propose method for generation of walking tours based on large multi-source dataset. In order to create this dataset, we developed data crawling framework, which is able to collect data from Instagram at high speed. We provide several use cases for the developed itinerary generation method and demonstrate that it can significantly enrich standard touristic paths provided by official site

Quiet paths for people : developing routing analysis and Web GIS application

Altistuminen saasteille saattaa vähentää merkittävästi aktiivisten liikkumismuotojen, kuten kävelyn ja pyöräilyn terveyshyötyjä. Yksi liikenteestä johtuvista saasteista on melu, joka voi aiheuttaa terveyshaittoja, kuten kohonnutta verenpainetta ja stressiä. Aikaisemmissa tutkimuksissa ja selvityksissä melulle altistumista on arvioutu yleensä kotipaikan suhteen ja liikkumisen aikana tapahtuva altistus on jäänyt vähemmälle huomiolle. Koska liikkumisen aikainen (dynaaminen) melualtistus saattaa muodostaa merkittävän oan kaupunkilaisten päivittäisestä kokonaismelualtistuksesta, tarvitaan kehittyneempiä menetelmiä dynaamisen melualtistuksen arvioimiseen ja vähentämiseen. Tässä tutkielmassa kehitin kävelyn reititysmenetelmän ja sovelluksen, jolla voi 1) etsiä lyhimmän reitin, 2) mallintaa kävelyn aikaisen melualtistuksen ja 3) löytää vaihtoehtoisia, hiljaisempia reittejä. Sovellus hyödyntää OpenStreetMap-tieverkostoaineistoa ja mallinnettua aineistoa tieliikenteen tyypillisistä päiväajan melutasoista. Reitinetsintä perustuu kehittämääni melukustannusfunktioon ja alhaisimman kustannuksen reititysanalyysiin. Melukustannukset lasketaan sovelluksessa lukuisilla eri meluherkkyyskertoimilla, minkä ansiosta sovellus löytää useita vaihtoehtoisia (hiljaisempia) reittejä. Jotta eri reittien meluisuutta (melualtistuksia) voidaan vertailla, kehitin sarjan melualtistusindeksejä. Tapaustutkimuksessa tutkin Helsingistä tehtävien työmatkojen aikaisia melualtistuksia; selvitin rekistereihin perustuvien työmatkojen mukaiset joukkoliikennereitit ja tutkin reittien kävelyosuuksien aikaisia melualtistuksia reitittämällä kävelyreitit uudestaan kehittämälläni reitityssovelluksella. Lisäksi tutkin hiljaisempien reittivaihtoehtojen mahdollistamia vähennyksiä melualtistuksissa tapaustutkimuksessa mallinnetuilla kävelyreiteillä. Tapaustutkimuksen tulokset indikoivat, että tyypilliset dynaamiset melualtistukset vaihtelevat huomattavasti eri asuinpaikkojen välillä. Toisaalta merkittävä osa melulle altistumisesta on mahdollista välttää hiljaisemmilla reittivaihtoehdoilla; tilanteesta riippuen, hiljaisemmat reitit tarjoavat keskimäärin 12–57 % vähennyksen altistuksessa yli 65 dB melutasoille ja 1.6–9.6 dB keskimääräisen vähennyksen reittien keskimääräisessä melutasossa. Altistuksen mahdolliseen vähennykseen näyttäisivät vaikuttavan ainakin 1) melualtistuksen suuruus lyhimmällä (ts. verrokki) reitillä, 2) lyhimmän reitin pituus, eli etäisyys lähtö- ja kohdepisteen välillä reititysgraafissa ja 3) hiljaisemman reitin pituus lyhimpään reittiin verrattuna. Julkaisin hiljaisten kävelyreittien reitityssovelluksen avoimena web-rajapintapalveluna (API - Application Programming Interface) ja kehitin hiljaisten kävelyreittien reittioppaan mobiilioptimoituna web-karttasovelluksena. Kaikki tutkielmassa kehitetyt menetelmät ja lähdekoodit ovat avoimesti saatavilla GitHub-palvelussa. Yksilöiden ja kaupunkisuunnittelijoiden tietoutta dynaamisesta altistuksesta melulle (ja muille saasteille) tulisi lisätä kehittämällä altistusten arviointiin ja vähentämiseen kehittyneempiä analyyseja ja sovelluksia. Tässä tutkielmassa kehitetty web-karttasovellus havainnollistaa hiljaisten reittien reititysmenetelmän toimivuutta tosielämän tilanteissa ja voi näin ollen auttaa jalankulkijoita löytämään hiljaisempia, ja siten terveellisempiä, reittivaihtoehtoja. Kun ympäristöllisiin altistuksiin perustuvaa reitinetsintää kehitetään pidemmälle, tulisi pyrkiä huomioimaan useampia erillisiä altistuksia samanaikaisesti ja siten reitittämään yleisesti ottaen terveellisempiä reittejä.It is likely that journey-time exposure to pollutants limit the positive health effects of active transport modes (e.g. walking and cycling). One of the pollutants caused by vehicular traffic is traffic noise, which is likely to cause various negative health effects such as increased stress levels and blood pressure. In prior studies, individuals’ exposure to community noise has usually been assessed only with respect to home location, as required by national and international policies. However, these static exposure assessments most likely ignore a substantial share of individuals’ total daily noise exposure that occurs while they are on the move. Hence, new methods are needed for both assessing and reducing journey-time exposure to traffic noise as well as to other pollutants. In this study, I developed a multifunctional routing application for 1) finding shortest paths, 2) assessing dynamic exposure to noise on the paths and 3) finding alternative, quieter paths for walking. The application uses street network data from OpenStreetMap and modeled traffic noise data of typical daytime traffic noise levels. The underlying least cost path (LCP) analysis employs a custom-designed environmental impedance function for noise and a set of (various) noise sensitivity coefficients. I defined a set of indices for quantifying and comparing dynamic (i.e. journey-time) exposure to high noise levels. I applied the developed routing application in a case study of pedestrians’ dynamic exposure to noise on commuting related walks in Helsinki. The walks were projected by carrying out an extensive public transport itinerary planning on census based commuting flow data. In addition, I assessed achievable reductions in exposure to traffic noise by taking quieter paths with statistical means by a subset of 18446 commuting related walks (OD pairs). The results show significant spatial variation in average dynamic noise exposure between neighborhoods but also significant achievable reductions in noise exposure by quieter paths; depending on the situation, quieter paths provide 12–57 % mean reduction in exposure to noise levels higher than 65 dB and 1.6–9.6 dB mean reduction in mean dB (compared to the shortest paths). At least three factors seem to affect the achievable reduction in noise exposure on alternative paths: 1) exposure to noise on the shortest path, 2) length of the shortest path and 3) length of the quiet path compared to the shortest path. I have published the quiet path routing application as a web-based quiet path routing API (application programming interface) and developed an accompanying quiet path route planner as a mobile-friendly web map application. The online quiet path route planner demonstrates the applicability of the quiet path routing method in real-life situations and can thus help pedestrians to choose quieter paths. Since the quiet path routing API is open, anyone can query short and quiet paths equipped with attributes on journey-time exposure to noise. All methods and source codes developed in the study are openly available via GitHub. Individuals’ and urban planners’ awareness of dynamic exposure to noise and other pollutants should be further increased with advanced exposure assessments and routing applications. Web-based exposure-aware route planner applications have the potential to help individuals to choose alternative, healthier paths. When developing exposure-based routing analysis further, attempts should be made to enable simultaneously considering multiple environmental exposures in order to find overall healthier paths

Automatic reconstruction of itineraries from descriptive texts

Esta tesis se inscribe dentro del marco del proyecto PERDIDO donde los objetivos son la extracción y reconstrucción de itinerarios a partir de documentos textuales. Este trabajo se ha realizado en colaboración entre el laboratorio LIUPPA de l' Université de Pau et des Pays de l' Adour (France), el grupo de Sistemas de Información Avanzados (IAAA) de la Universidad de Zaragoza y el laboratorio COGIT de l' IGN (France). El objetivo de esta tesis es concebir un sistema automático que permita extraer, a partir de guías de viaje o descripciones de itinerarios, los desplazamientos, además de representarlos sobre un mapa. Se propone una aproximación para la representación automática de itinerarios descritos en lenguaje natural. Nuestra propuesta se divide en dos tareas principales. La primera pretende identificar y extraer de los textos describiendo itinerarios información como entidades espaciales y expresiones de desplazamiento o percepción. El objetivo de la segunda tarea es la reconstrucción del itinerario. Nuestra propuesta combina información local extraída gracias al procesamiento del lenguaje natural con datos extraídos de fuentes geográficas externas (por ejemplo, gazetteers). La etapa de anotación de informaciones espaciales se realiza mediante una aproximación que combina el etiquetado morfo-sintáctico y los patrones léxico-sintácticos (cascada de transductores) con el fin de anotar entidades nombradas espaciales y expresiones de desplazamiento y percepción. Una primera contribución a la primera tarea es la desambiguación de topónimos, que es un problema todavía mal resuelto dentro del reconocimiento de entidades nombradas (Named Entity Recognition - NER) y esencial en la recuperación de información geográfica. Se plantea un algoritmo no supervisado de georreferenciación basado en una técnica de clustering capaz de proponer una solución para desambiguar los topónimos los topónimos encontrados en recursos geográficos externos, y al mismo tiempo, la localización de topónimos no referenciados. Se propone un modelo de grafo genérico para la reconstrucción automática de itinerarios, donde cada nodo representa un lugar y cada arista representa un camino enlazando dos lugares. La originalidad de nuestro modelo es que además de tener en cuenta los elementos habituales (caminos y puntos del recorrido), permite representar otros elementos involucrados en la descripción de un itinerario, como por ejemplo los puntos de referencia visual. Se calcula de un árbol de recubrimiento mínimo a partir de un grafo ponderado para obtener automáticamente un itinerario bajo la forma de un grafo. Cada arista del grafo inicial se pondera mediante un método de análisis multicriterio que combina criterios cualitativos y cuantitativos. El valor de estos criterios se determina a partir de informaciones extraídas del texto e informaciones provenientes de recursos geográficos externos. Por ejemplo, se combinan las informaciones generadas por el procesamiento del lenguaje natural como las relaciones espaciales describiendo una orientación (ej: dirigirse hacia el sur) con las coordenadas geográficas de lugares encontrados dentro de los recursos para determinar el valor del criterio ``relación espacial''. Además, a partir de la definición del concepto de itinerario y de las informaciones utilizadas en la lengua para describir un itinerario, se ha modelado un lenguaje de anotación de información espacial adaptado a la descripción de desplazamientos, apoyándonos en las recomendaciones del consorcio TEI (Text Encoding and Interchange). Finalmente, se ha implementado y evaluado las diferentes etapas de nuestra aproximación sobre un corpus multilingüe de descripciones de senderos y excursiones (francés, español, italiano)

Modeling Barcelona sidewalks: a high resolution urban scale assessment of the geometric attributes of the walkable network

Within the framework of urban pedestrian networks, this paper presents a method of modeling the street network from the perspective of foot traffic, beyond the vehicle-focused street centerline representation approach in transportation research. A scalable method to extract the centerlines of the complete walkable urban area from its polygon representation at a one-meter resolution is discussed, using open-source tools. To evaluate the betweenness centrality in a spatially directed graph, the process is applied to the study of the ‘walkable Barcelona’, focusing on three key parameters: 1) the street width, 2) the longitudinal slope, and 3) the crosswalks connecting the sidewalk platforms. The results identify the uneven distribution of these parameters within a complex urban fabric, and the high-resolution cartography allows the identification of critical areas within the network, introducing future lines of research and applications of the workflow. This is especially relevant considering the increasing awareness of citizens and the urban agendas worldwide, aimed at improving and widening the sidewalk infrastructure that supports local activity in cities.Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::11 - Ciutats i Comunitats SosteniblesObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::9 - Indústria, Innovació i InfraestructuraObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::11 - Ciutats i Comunitats Sostenibles::11.2 - Per a 2030, proporcionar accés a sistemes de transport segurs, assequibles, accessi­bles i sostenibles per a totes les persones, i millorar la seguretat viària, en particular mitjan­çant l’ampliació del transport públic, amb especial atenció a les necessitats de les persones en situació vulnerable, dones, nenes, nens, persones amb discapacitat i persones gransObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::9 - Indústria, Innovació i Infraestructura::9.1 - Desenvolupar infraestructures fiables, sostenibles, resilients i de qualitat, incloent infraestructures regionals i transfrontereres, per tal de donar suport al desenvolupament econòmic i al benestar humà, amb especial atenció a l’accés assequible i equitatiu per a totes les personesPostprint (published version

“HERITAGE & DEVELOPMENT” STRATEGY ON HISTORIC URBAN LANDSCAPE (HUL): THE ADDED VALUE OF MULTI-TEMPORAL HUB APPLICATION

Growing interest in boosting urban identity and character is increasing the demand for historic maps and documents of cities in constant evolution as in the case of metropolitan areas, peripheries and riverbank sites. A ‘Heritage & Development strategy based on the Historic Urban Landscape approach is required by city makers to ensure that exploitation needs can valorise the site’s natural and cultural heritage for sustainable social and economic optimisation.This paper intends to propose innovative virtual hub technologies of brokering, discovering and accessing open data, making available - to a large public of users - the multi-temporal dense stratified evidences of the targeted built environment areas and its surroundings, through the navigation of geo-referenced historical maps, together with current maps, going through design data. Enhancing the practice of publishing maps as open data represents a powerful leverage for time and cost effectiveness among planners, scientists and historians; soliciting their use to gain a vast knowledge of that areas, including a better comprehension of the transformations over the centuries, in order to support decision-making analysis, environmental monitoring and urban area planning; thus contribute to improving the sustainability of interventions respectful of the identity of the urban landscape. A case study of the ‘Deux Rives’ planning area in the city of Strasbourg is presented to illustrate these issues. The City of Strasbourg’s commendable work in publishing the historical maps supports the municipal authority’s Heritage & Development strategy in meeting contemporary and future needs while mitigating long-term damage from pressures for new interventions. Innovative virtual hub based applications to gather open data coming from different sources (city territorial services, design data sources, mobility services) can result in immeasurable added value through communicating the wealth of the planned areas and raising awareness among citizens and visitors of the interventions.</p

Geospatial Analysis and Modeling of Textual Descriptions of Pre-modern Geography

Textual descriptions of pre-modern geography offer a different view of classical geography. The descriptions have been produced when none of the modern geographical concepts and tools were available. In this dissertation, we study pre-modern geography by primarily finding the existing structures of the descriptions and different cases of geographical data. We first explain four major geographical cases in pre-modern Arabic sources: gazetteer, administrative hierarchies, routes, and toponyms associated with people. Focusing on hierarchical divisions and routes, we offer approaches for manual annotation of administrative hierarchies and route sections as well as a semi-automated toponyms annotation. The latter starts with a fuzzy search of toponyms from an authority list and applies two different extrapolation models to infer true or false values, based on the context, for disambiguating the automatically annotated toponyms. Having the annotated data, we introduce mathematical models to shape and visualize regions based on the description of administrative hierarchies. Moreover, we offer models for comparing hierarchical divisions and route networks from different sources. We also suggest approaches to approximate geographical coordinates for places that do not have geographical coordinates - we call them unknown places - which is a major issue in visualization of pre-modern places on map. The final chapter of the dissertation introduces the new version of al-Ṯurayyā, a gazetteer and a spatial model of the classical Islamic world using georeferenced data of a pre-modern atlas with more than 2, 000 toponyms and routes. It offers search, path finding, and flood network functionalities as well as visualizations of regions using one of the models that we describe for regions. However the gazetteer is designed using the classical Islamic world data, the spatial model and features can be used for similarly prepared datasets.:1 Introduction 1 2 Related Work 8 2.1 GIS 8 2.2 NLP, Georeferencing, Geoparsing, Annotation 10 2.3 Gazetteer 15 2.4 Modeling 17 3 Classical Geographical Cases 20 3.1 Gazetteer 21 3.2 Routes and Travelogues 22 3.3 Administrative Hierarchy 24 3.4 Geographical Aspects of Biographical Data 25 4 Annotation and Extraction 27 4.1 Annotation 29 4.1.1 Manual Annotation of Geographical Texts 29 4.1.1.1 Administrative Hierarchy 30 4.1.1.2 Routes and Travelogues 32 4.1.2 Semi-Automatic Toponym Annotation 34 4.1.2.1 The Annotation Process 35 4.1.2.2 Extrapolation Models 37 4.1.2.2.1 Frequency of Toponymic N-grams 37 4.1.2.2.2 Co-occurrence Frequencies 38 4.1.2.2.3 A Supervised ML Approach 40 4.1.2.3 Summary 45 4.2 Data Extraction and Structures 45 4.2.1 Administrative Hierarchy 45 4.2.2 Routes and Distances 49 5 Modeling Geographical Data 51 5.1 Mathematical Models for Administrative Hierarchies 52 5.1.1 Sample Data 53 5.1.2 Quadtree 56 5.1.3 Voronoi Diagram 58 5.1.4 Voronoi Clippings 62 5.1.4.1 Convex Hull 62 5.1.4.2 Concave Hull 63 5.1.5 Convex Hulls 65 5.1.6 Concave Hulls 67 5.1.7 Route Network 69 5.1.8 Summary of Models for Administrative Hierarchy 69 5.2 Comparison Models 71 5.2.1 Hierarchical Data 71 5.2.1.1 Test Data 73 5.2.2 Route Networks 76 5.2.2.1 Post-processing 81 5.2.2.2 Applications 82 5.3 Unknown Places 84 6 Al-Ṯurayyā 89 6.1 Introducing al-Ṯurayyā 90 6.2 Gazetteer 90 6.3 Spatial Model 91 6.3.1 Provinces and Administrative Divisions 93 6.3.2 Pathfinding and Itineraries 93 6.3.3 Flood Network 96 6.3.4 Path Alignment Tool 97 6.3.5 Data Structure 99 6.3.5.1 Places 100 6.3.5.2 Routes and Distances 100 7 Conclusions and Further Work 10

Travel and interaction in the Greek and Roman world. A review of some computational modelling approaches

Inferring dynamic past behaviours from the static archaeological record is always a challenge, but computational and quantitative techniques can be helpful. In particular, they can provide useful insight on patterns of movement and interaction, by better characterising existing archaeological evidence, suggesting simple models of mobile decision-making or proposing expected patterns against which the observed record can be compared. This paper reviews the range of modelling options now available for understanding the movement and interaction behind the archaeological and historical record. There are increasing opportunities not only to pick and choose between different modelling approaches, but also to integrate them in a more theoretically and practically satisfactory way

Watery pasts and the constellation of the canal

Heritage trails are an important route into accessing the histories of waterways. They are a multifaceted tourist product, combining a series of complex environmental, economic and cultural policy objectives, and are increasingly used by communities and public agencies as a tool to encourage recreational use along linear corridors. This paper seeks to open a discussion about the use of heritage trails and the processes of heritigisation by thinking about the archival qualities of the canal. It reflects upon research carried out as part of the AHRC-funded ‘European Waterways Heritage’ project, which (through its UK case study) has produced a new 5km heritage trail for the Ashton Canal in Greater Manchester. The paper considers what happens during a process of historical reconstruction and rehabilitation of cultural heritage when a canal is found to be layered in the unspectacular – lacking any special, historical, technical or aesthetic attributes. Using Walter Benjamin’s (1999) concepts of the ‘flash’ and ‘constellation’, alongside cultural geographic readings of post-industrial atmospheres, we seek to think with the water and the surrounding built environment of the waterway in a way that suspends an “indexical imaginary” (van Wyck, 2010) and which encourages a deeper embodied engagement with our surroundings, its material and non-material properties, its happenings and incidence. The paper thus has implications for how we write and construct heritage trails, facilitate new user experiences, and deepen forms of public engagement about our watery pasts