Innovative approaches to urban data management using emerging technologies

Many characteristics of Smart cities rely on a sufficient quantity and quality of urban data. Local industry and developers can use this data for application development that improves life of all citizens. Therefore, the handling and usability of this data is a big challenge for smart cities. In this paper we investigate new approaches to urban data management using emerging technologies and give an insight on further research conducted within the EC-funded smarticipate project. Geospatial data cannot be handled well in classical relational database environments. Either they are just put in as binary large objects or have to be broken down into elementary types which can be handled by the database, in many cases resulting in a slow system, since the database technology is not really tuned for delivery on mass data as classical relational databases are optimized for online transaction processing and not analytic processing. Document-based databases provide a better performance, but still struggle with the challenge of large binary objects. Also the heterogeneity of data requires a lot of mapping and data cleansing, in some cases replication can’t be avoided. Another approach is to use Semantic Web technologies to enhance the data and build up relations and connections between entities. However, data formats such as RDF use a different approach and are not suitable for geospatial data leading to a lack on usability. Search engines are a good example of web applications with a high usability. The users must be able to find the right data and get information of related or close matches. This allows information retrieval in an easy to use fashion. The same principles should be applied to geospatial data, which would improve the usability of open data. Combined with data mining and big data technologies those principles would improve the usability of open geospatial data and even lead to new ways to use it. By helping with the interpretation of data in a certain context data is transformed into useful information. In this paper we analyse key features of open geodata portals such as linked data and machine learning in order to show ways of improving the user experience. Based on the Smarticipate projects we show afterwards as open data and geo data online and see the practical application. We also give an outlook on piloting cases where we want to evaluate, how the technologies presented in this paper can be combined to a usefull open data portal. In contrast to the previous EC-funded project urbanapi, where participative processes in smart cities where created with urban data, we go one step further with semantic web and open data. Thereby we achieve a more general approach on open data portals for spatial data and how to improve their usability. The envisioned architecture of the smarticipate project relies on file based storage and a no-copy strategy, which means that data is mostly kept in its original format, a conversion to another format is only done if necessary (e.g. the current format has limitations on domain specific attributes or the user requests a specific format). A strictly functional approach and architecture is envisioned which allows a massively parallel execution and therefore is predestined to be deployed in a cloud environment. The actual search interface uses a domain specific vocabulary which can be customised for special purposes or for users that consider their context and expertise, which should abstract from technology specific peculiarities. Also application programmers will benefit form this architecture as linked data principles will be followed extensively. For example, the JSON and JSON-LD standards will be used, so that web developers can use results of the data store directly without the need for conversion. Also links to further information will be provided within the data, so that a drill down is possible for more details. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. After the introduction about open data and data in general we look at related work and existing open data portals. This leads to the main chapter about the key technology aspects for an easy-to-use open data portal. This is followed by Chapter five, an introduction of the EC-funded project smarticipate, in which the key technology aspects of chapter four will be included

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

Achieving Sustainability Through Geodata: An Empirical Study of Challenges and Barriers

Master's thesis in Information systems (IS501)Research within data management is often based on the elements of the data lifecycle. Organizations and businesses are also becoming more interested in data lifecycle management to leverage their data streams, compounded by an interest in geographical attributes within the data –referred to as geodata. Geodata provides a richer basis for analysis and is increasingly important within urban planning. Furthermore, the pressure to achieve sustainability goals calls for improving the data lifecycle. The challenge remainsas to what can be improvedwithin the data lifecycle –with geodata as an important input –to achieve sustainability dimensions. Our main contribution through this study is shedding light on challenges withgeodata from an Information Systems (IS) and sustainability perspective. Additionally, the identified challenges are also feedback to data management research and the data lifecycle

ISPRS-SHY – OPEN DATA COLLECTOR FOR SUPPORTING GROUND TRUTH REMOTE SENSING ANALYSIS

Abstract. The 2021 Scientific Initiatives in ISPRS funded this project called ISRS-SHY from "SHare mY ground truth". It was intended as a collector of geographic data to support image analysis by sharing the necessary ground truth data needed for rigorous analysis. Regression and classification tasks that use remote sensing imagery necessarily require some control on the ground. The rationale behind this project is that often data on the ground is collected during projects, but is not valued by sharing across projects and teams globally. Internet has improved the way that data are shared, but there are still limitations related to discoverability of the data and its integrity. In other words, data are usually kept in local storage or, if in an accessible server, they are not documented and therefore they will not be picked up during search. In this initiative we created a portal using the Geonode environment to provide a hub for sharing data between research groups and openly to the community. The portal was then tested within the framework of three projects, with several participants each. The data that was uploaded and shared covered all types of geographic data formats and sizes. Further sharing was done in the context of teaching activities in higher education.The results show the importance of creating easy means to find data and share it across stakeholders. Qualitative results are discussed, and future steps will focus on quantitative assessment of the portal's usage, e.g. number of registered users in time, number of visits, and other key performance indicators. The results of this project are to be considered also in light of the effort in the scientific community to make research data available, i.e. FAIR - Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets

Disaster Monitoring with Wikipedia and Online Social Networking Sites: Structured Data and Linked Data Fragments to the Rescue?

In this paper, we present the first results of our ongoing early-stage research on a realtime disaster detection and monitoring tool. Based on Wikipedia, it is language-agnostic and leverages user-generated multimedia content shared on online social networking sites to help disaster responders prioritize their efforts. We make the tool and its source code publicly available as we make progress on it. Furthermore, we strive to publish detected disasters and accompanying multimedia content following the Linked Data principles to facilitate its wide consumption, redistribution, and evaluation of its usefulness.Comment: Accepted for publication at the AAAI Spring Symposium 2015: Structured Data for Humanitarian Technologies: Perfect fit or Overkill? #SD4HumTech1

Geodata intellectual property rights policy

In this paper, the author presents intellectual property law policies related to geodata. The sole purpose of this paper is to open up this problem for further investigation and discussion. The concepts of geodata and legal interoperability have not received as much scholarly attention as they merit. Drafting one single model for geodata access is especially hard, given that geodata is produced and maintained in multifold environments. This makes it important to confront and discuss the factors influencing the licensing of geodata. On this basis the author proposes a taxonomy of the extremely diverse licenses for geodata.W niniejszym artykule autorka przedstawia zasady prawa własności intelektualnej rządzące geodanymi. Głównym celem tego artykułu jest otwarcie tego problemu na dalsze badania i dyskusje. Koncepcje geodanych i ich prawnej interoperacyjności nie spotkały się dotychczas z tak dużym zainteresowaniem naukowym, jak powinny. Opracowanie jednego modelu dostępu do geodanych jest szczególnie trudne, biorąc pod uwagę, że geodane są wytwarzane i przechowywane w różnych środowiskach przy całej ich złożoności. Dlatego ważne jest, aby skonfrontować i omówić czynniki wpływające na licencjonowanie geodanych. Na tej podstawie autorka proponuje taksonomię niezwykle różnorodnych licencji na geodane

Geomatics in physiognomic landscape research: A Dutch view

Geomatics is a technology and service sector focussing on the acquisition, storage, analysis and management of geographically referenced information for improved decision-making. Landscape physiognomic and research –and its GI science application. The geomatics developments since 40 years confront us with many new algorithms and a variety of geo data. Due to these the interest in physiognomic research has been increased. This article links the variety of geodata and its processing functions to the landscape physiognomic research framework. This link is based on an overview of the geo data, the intended applications in landscape physiognomic research and the functions to perform. The article provides an overview of geographical data using/driving methods and applications that may support physiognomic landscape research that longs from methods that rely on geo-data that ranges from a administratively defined (INSPIRE), professional experiment acquired  up to collected by volunteers. These methods may act manifold: describe, proof and project of space as could be perceived, imagined and created from both perspectives affectively and cognitively. Besides to communicate results the methods include persistently also analysis by visualization. Other findings are the interest in changing objects of the landscape and perception via moving subjects

How can municipalities benefit by using IoT and AI with geodata to enhance their services? : The Case of City of Vienna

This study investigates which benefits occur for the different stakeholder groups of a municipality when a municipality enhances its internal and external services using the technologies IoT and AI with geodata. The stakeholder groups are which are public administration, enterprises, and citizens. The research method for this thesis was the usage of qualitative case study research. The Case study was focused on a single case – The City of Vienna. First, an analysis of strategy papers for Smart City, digitalization, AI, and IoT was done. Secondly, the documentation for the program" Wien gibt Raum", including the internal software" Kappazunder" and the One-Stop-Shop, were studied and described. Lastly, semi-structured interviews were conducted with five participants. The interviewees had diverse backgrounds. All interviewees were involved in the program" Wien gibt Raum" or have a long-term vision on the further data usage of the gathered data. As prior literature did not provide a suitable benefit framework, an adapted benefit framework was created. This adapted benefit framework is based on multiple benefit evaluation frameworks from prior literature. With the usage of this framework, it was possible to analyze the documentations and interview results. The analysis with the adapted benefit framework made it possible to demonstrate and categorize the benefits in an organized way. The analysis results show that the public administration's main benefits are efficiency and productivity improvements, better data quality, and data completeness. In the next step, with the usage of the newly generated data, a further efficiency increase, better decision-making, and better forecasts can be expected. The study showed that the citizens and enterprises mainly benefit indirectly from a better-managed city. A better-managed city will lead to time savings, easier accessibility, a better quality of the information provided by municipalities, and increased quality of life

The XII century towers, a benchmark of the Rome countryside almost cancelled. The safeguard plan by low cost uav and terrestrial DSM photogrammetry surveying and 3D Web GIS applications

“Giving a bird-fly look at the Rome countryside, throughout the Middle Age central period, it would show as if the multiple city towers has been widely spread around the territory” on a radial range of maximum thirty kilometers far from the Capitol Hill center (Carocci and Vendittelli, 2004). This is the consequence of the phenomenon identified with the “Incasalamento” neologism, described in depth in the following paper, intended as the general process of expansion of the urban society interests outside the downtown limits, started from the half of the XII and developed through all the XIII century, slowing down and ending in the following years. From the XIX century till today the architectural finds of this reality have raised the interest of many national and international scientists, which aimed to study and catalog them all to create a complete framework that, cause of its extension, didn’t allow yet attempting any element by element detailed analysis. From the described situation has started our plan of intervention, we will apply integrated survey methods and technologies of terrestrial and UAV near stereo-photogrammetry, by the use of low cost drones, more than action cameras and reflex on extensible rods, integrated and referenced with GPS and topographic survey. In the final project we intend to produce some 3D scaled and textured surface models of any artifact (almost two hundreds were firstly observed still standing), to singularly study the dimensions and structure, to analyze the building materials and details and to formulate an hypothesis about any function, based even on the position along the territory. These models, successively georeferenced, will be imported into a 2D and 3D WebGIS and organized in layers made visible on basemaps of reference, as much as on historical maps