MSUO Information Technology and Geographical Information Systems: Common Protocols & Procedures. Report to the Marine Safety Umbrella Operation

The Marine Safety Umbrella Operation (MSUO) facilitates the cooperation between Interreg funded Marine Safety Projects and maritime stakeholders. The main aim of MSUO is to permit efficient operation of new projects through Project Cooperation Initiatives, these include the review of the common protocols and procedures for Information Technology (IT) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). This study carried out by CSA Group and the National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG) reviews current spatial information standards in Europe and the data management methodologies associated with different marine safety projects. International best practice was reviewed based on the combined experience of spatial data research at NCG and initiatives in the US, Canada and the UK relating to marine security service information and acquisition and integration of large marine datasets for ocean management purposes. This report identifies the most appropriate international data management practices that could be adopted for future MSUO projects

Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web 2.0 through Crowdsourcing

The authors describe how we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data. The authors begin with GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base. The authors then describe MapTube that enables users to archive maps and demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be shared, and to create new maps from the bottom-up using a combination of crowdcasting, crowdsourcing, and traditional broadcasting. The authors conclude by arguing that such tools are helping to define a neogeography that is essentially "mapping for the masses,'' while noting that there are many issues of quality, accuracy, copyright, and trust that will influence the impact of these tools on map-based communication

Web-Based Visualization of Very Large Scientific Astronomy Imagery

Visualizing and navigating through large astronomy images from a remote location with current astronomy display tools can be a frustrating experience in terms of speed and ergonomics, especially on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a high performance, versatile and robust client-server system for remote visualization and analysis of extremely large scientific images. Applications of this work include survey image quality control, interactive data query and exploration, citizen science, as well as public outreach. The proposed software is entirely open source and is designed to be generic and applicable to a variety of datasets. It provides access to floating point data at terabyte scales, with the ability to precisely adjust image settings in real-time. The proposed clients are light-weight, platform-independent web applications built on standard HTML5 web technologies and compatible with both touch and mouse-based devices. We put the system to the test and assess the performance of the system and show that a single server can comfortably handle more than a hundred simultaneous users accessing full precision 32 bit astronomy data.Comment: Published in Astronomy & Computing. IIPImage server available from http://iipimage.sourceforge.net . Visiomatic code and demos available from http://www.visiomatic.org

A New Method for ISOCAM Data Reduction - I. Application to the European Large Area ISO Survey Southern Field: Method and Results

We have developed a new data reduction technique for ISOCAM LW data and have applied it to the European Large Area ISO Survey (ELAIS) LW3 (15 micron) observations in the southern hemisphere (S1). This method, known as LARI technique and based on the assumption of the existence of two different time scales in ISOCAM transients (accounting either for fast or slow detector response), was particularly designed for the detection of faint sources. In the ELAIS S1 field we obtained a catalogue of 462 15 micron sources with signal-to-noise ratio >= 5 and flux densities in the range 0.45 - 150 mJy (filling the whole flux range between the Deep ISOCAM Surveys and the IRAS Faint Source Survey). The completeness at different flux levels and the photometric accuracy of this catalogue have been tested with simulations. Here we present a detailed description of the method and discuss the results obtained by its application to the S1 LW3 data.Comment: 20 pages, LaTeX, MNRAS style, 20 postscript figures, full catalogue not yet available at http://boas5.bo.astro.it/~elais/catalogues/. Accepted for publication in MNRA

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

Use of remotely-derived bathymetry for modelling biomass in marine environments

The paper presents results on the influence of geometric attributes of satellite-derived raster bathymetric data, namely the General Bathymetric Charts of the Oceans, on spatial statistical modelling of marine biomass. In the initial experiment, both the resolution and projection of the raster dataset are taken into account. It was found that, independently of the equal-area projection chosen for the analysis, the calculated areas are very similar, and the differences between them are insignificant. Likewise, any variation in the raster resolution did not change the computed area. Although the differences were shown to be insignificant, for the subsequent analysis we selected the cylindrical equal area projection, as it implies rectangular spatial extent, along with the automatically derived resolution. Then, in the second experiment, we focused on demersal fish biomass data acquired from trawl samples taken from the western parts of ICES Sub-area VII, near the sea floor. The aforementioned investigation into processing bathymetric data allowed us to build various statistical models that account for a relationship between biomass, sea floor topography and geographic location. We fitted a set of generalised additive models and generalised additive mixed models to combinations of trawl data of the roundnose grenadier (Coryphaenoides rupestris) and bathymetry. Using standard statistical techniques—such as analysis of variance, Akaike information criterion, root mean squared error, mean absolute error and cross-validation—we compared the performance of the models and found that depth and latitude may serve as statistically significant explanatory variables for biomass of roundnose grenadier in the study area. However, the results should be interpreted with caution as sampling locations may have an impact on the biomass–depth relationship

FIRBACK: II. Data Reduction and Calibration of the 170 micron ISO Deep Cosmological Survey

We present the final reduction and calibration of the FIRBACK ISOPHOT data. FIRBACK is a deep cosmological survey performed at 170 microns. This paper deals with the ISOPHOT C200 camera with the C160 filter. We review the whole data reduction process and compare our final calibration with DIRBE (for the extended emission) and IRAS (for point sources). The FIRBACK source extraction and galaxy counts is discussed in a companion paper (Dole et al., 2001).Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A. 9 pages, includes new aa.cls. Also available (with better quality figures) at http://wwwfirback.ias.u-psud.fr and http://mips.as.arizona.edu/~hdole/firback (new aa.cls is here

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