Enjeux de la standardisation des représentations cartographiques : Vers une révision de Symbology Encoding

National audienceCette présentation réalisée pour le séminaire transversal du département Aménagement, Mobilité et Environnement (AME) ayant comme thème "Analyse et représentation géographique des données environnementales" expose les limites des standards de cartographie et propose des éléments pour une révision du standard Symbology Encoding

3D URBAN GEOVISUALIZATION: IN SITU AUGMENTED AND MIXED REALITY EXPERIMENTS

In this paper, we assume that augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) are relevant contexts for 3D urban geovisualization, especially in order to support the design of the urban spaces. We propose to design an in situ MR application, that could be helpful for urban designers, providing tools to interactively remove or replace buildings in situ. This use case requires advances regarding existing geovisualization methods. We highlight the need to adapt and extend existing 3D geovisualization pipelines, in order to adjust the specific requirements for AR/MR applications, in particular for data rendering and interaction. In order to reach this goal, we focus on and implement four elementary in situ and ex situ AR/MR experiments: each type of these AR/MR experiments helps to consider and specify a specific subproblem, i.e. scale modification, pose estimation, matching between scene and urban project realism, and the mix of real and virtual elements through portals, while proposing occlusion handling, rendering and interaction techniques to solve them

OGRS2012 Symposium Proceedings

Do you remember the Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Symposium (OGRS) in Nantes? "Les Machines de l’Île", the Big Elephant, the "Storm Boat" with Claramunt, Petit et al. (2009), and "le Biniou et la Bombarde"? A second edition of OGRS was promised, and that promise is now fulfilled in OGRS 2012, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, October 24-26, 2012. OGRS is a meeting dedicated to sharing knowledge, new solutions, methods, practices, ideas and trends in the field of geospatial information through the development and the use of free and open source software in both research and education. In recent years, the development of geospatial free and open source software (GFOSS) has breathed new life into the geospatial domain. GFOSS has been extensively promoted by FOSS4G events, which evolved from meetings which gathered together interested GFOSS development communities to a standard business conference. More in line with the academic side of the FOSS4G conferences, OGRS is a rather neutral forum whose goal is to assemble a community whose main concern is to find new solutions by sharing knowledge and methods free of software license limits. This is why OGRS is primarily concerned with the academic world, though it also involves public institutions, organizations and companies interested in geospatial innovation. This symposium is therefore not an exhibition for presenting existing industrial software solutions, but an event we hope will act as a catalyst for research and innovation and new collaborations between research teams, public agencies and industries. An educational aspect has recently been added to the content of the symposium. This important addition examines the knowledge triangle - research, education, and innovation - through the lens of how open source methods can improve education efficiency. Based on their experience, OGRS contributors bring to the table ideas on how open source training is likely to offer pedagogical advantages to equip students with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in tomorrow’s geospatial labor market. OGRS brings together a large collection of current innovative research projects from around the world, with the goal of examining how research uses and contributes to open source initiatives. By presenting their research, OGRS contributors shed light on how the open-source approach impacts research, and vice-versa. The organizers of the symposium wish to demonstrate how the use and development of open source software strengthen education, research and innovation in geospatial fields. To support this approach, the present proceedings propose thirty short papers grouped under the following thematic headings: Education, Earth Science & Landscape, Data, Remote Sensing, Spatial Analysis, Urban Simulation and Tools. These papers are preceded by the contributions of the four keynote speakers: Prof Helena Mitasova, Dr Gérard Hégron, Prof Sergio Rey and Prof Robert Weibel, who share their expertise in research and education in order to highlight the decisive advantages of openness over the limits imposed by the closed-source license system

The case of Ferbritas Cadastre Information System

The processes of mobilization of land for infrastructures of public and private domain are developed according to proper legal frameworks and systematically confronted with the impoverished national situation as regards the cadastral identification and regularization, which leads to big inefficiencies, sometimes with very negative impact to the overall effectiveness. This project report describes Ferbritas Cadastre Information System (FBSIC) project and tools, which in conjunction with other applications, allow managing the entire life-cycle of Land Acquisition and Cadastre, including support to field activities with the integration of information collected in the field, the development of multi-criteria analysis information, monitoring all information in the exploration stage, and the automated generation of outputs. The benefits are evident at the level of operational efficiency, including tools that enable process integration and standardization of procedures, facilitate analysis and quality control and maximize performance in the acquisition, maintenance and management of registration information and expropriation (expropriation projects). Therefore, the implemented system achieves levels of robustness, comprehensiveness, openness, scalability and reliability suitable for a structural platform. The resultant solution, FBSIC, is a fit-for-purpose cadastre information system rooted in the field of railway infrastructures. FBSIC integrating nature of allows: to accomplish present needs and scale to meet future services; to collect, maintain, manage and share all information in one common platform, and transform it into knowledge; to relate with other platforms; to increase accuracy and productivity of business processes related with land property management

Transportation linear referencing toolboxes : a 'reflective practitioner's' design approach

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2000."September, 2000."Includes bibliographical references (p. 395-407).Seventy percent of the data of a typical transportation agency (e.g., bridges, accidents, etc.) has location as a primary reference. A Linear Referencing System (LRS) is the main way of identifying the location of this data and providing a storage key for it in a database. LRS is based on a one-dimensional offset on a predefined network. In theory, it is one of the simplest spatial cases. In reality, it can be spatially and analytically quite complex. LRS to quite recent date has been little formally researched. That research which has occurred has been the construction of large and comprehensive conceptual data models. This thesis is not primarily aimed at new "tool building research". The existing models have been based to only a limited extent on a fuller analysis of the nature of transportation and spatial data; they have not considered relevant field and wider methodological concerns (i.e., they followed a "model-driven" approach). The goal here is to create a more appropriate foundation and base from which LRS tools may be most appropriately built (i.e., a 'field-driven" approach). A "practitioners perspective" view of LRS was sought. Such a more holistic understanding was sought through the adoption of a "layered methodology" of research that involved gaining the perspectives of a variety of disciplinary viewpoints. This research framework was developed especially for this thesis based on the ideas and work of Schon and Reich. The approach involved in short a desk exercise in fundamental consideration of the nature of LRS, a deeper, cross-field synthesis and literature research, four in-depth state DOT LRS case studies, a panel of transportation field experts, a panel of national data model experts, and a limited object-orientated modeling exercise. The conclusion reached is that while LRS in the simple case can be modeled in general forms, it is also an "exception-driven" field. Thus, a "toolkit approach" may be more appropriate for LRS. It is inferred that this may hold for other similar application areas in transportation and planning. Further research would further develop the holistic layered methodology adopted here and further define the proposed LRS transportation application toolboxes.by Simon Lewis.Ph.D

Geospatial Computing: Architectures and Algorithms for Mapping Applications

Beginning with the MapTube website (1), which was launched in 2007 for crowd-sourcing maps, this project investigates approaches to exploratory Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using web-based mapping, or ‘web GIS’. Users can log in to upload their own maps and overlay different layers of GIS data sets. This work looks into the theory behind how web-based mapping systems function and whether their performance can be modelled and predicted. One of the important questions when dealing with different geospatial data sets is how they relate to one another. Internet data stores provide another source of information, which can be exploited if more generic geospatial data mining techniques are developed. The identification of similarities between thousands of maps is a GIS technique that can give structure to the overall fabric of the data, once the problems of scalability and comparisons between different geographies are solved. After running MapTube for nine years to crowd-source data, this would mark a natural progression from visualisation of individual maps to wider questions about what additional knowledge can be discovered from the data collected. In the new ‘data science’ age, the introduction of real-time data sets introduces a new challenge for web-based mapping applications. The mapping of real-time geospatial systems is technically challenging, but has the potential to show inter-dependencies as they emerge in the time series. Combined geospatial and temporal data mining of realtime sources can provide archives of transport and environmental data from which to accurately model the systems under investigation. By using techniques from machine learning, the models can be built directly from the real-time data stream. These models can then be used for analysis and experimentation, being derived directly from city data. This then leads to an analysis of the behaviours of the interacting systems. (1) The MapTube website: http://www.maptube.org

Cartographic user interface design models for mobile Location-Based Services applications

Mobile Location-Based Services (mLBS) offer a unique combination of digital content, portability, interactivity, location-awareness and real-time information delivery, providing increased convenience and support for everyday geospatial decision-making tasks, compared to more traditional printed maps and digital cartographic products. In spite of their benefits, however, limitations inherent within mLBS technology (e.g. small screens), along with the dynamic and changeable contexts in which they are used, impact on their effectiveness for communicating geospatial information to end users and, in turn, their overall acceptance. Identifying usefulness (i.e. utility and usability) as a key factor influencing the acceptance of mLBS products, this thesis details the investigation of techniques and a methodology for designing mLBS applications that communicate geospatial information in a useful manner to non-expert, general public users. The research presented here focuses on the usefulness of the entire cartographic user interface (UI) for mLBS applications – i.e. those components that are specifically concerned with the access and representation of, and interaction with, geospatial information – differentiating it from related mLBS research and application design. Particular emphasis was placed on the usefulness of the interplay between various geospatial components of the cartographic UI, in support of a broad range of everyday geospatial tasks for non-expert users. Contributing to this, a wide array of alternative techniques for representing, presenting and interacting with geospatial information were explored. To achieve its aims, the study adopted a qualitative User-Centred Design (UCD) methodology, involving an early focus on users and their tasks, empirical measurement of usage, and iterative design and evaluation, which together ensured that all design efforts were firmly grounded in the needs and characteristics of the end users. Necessarily focused on a specific application area (tourism) and an associated user group (travellers), the UCD process employed by the research was more comprehensive than had previously been undertaken within the cartographic discipline. The primary results of the research comprise a set of cartographic UI design models for communicating geospatial information in a useful manner to the non-expert users of a tourism-related mLBS application. These incorporate a range of alternative cartographic representation, presentation and interaction techniques considered useful by representative users, with egocentric maps arguably holding the greatest importance. The wider benefits of the design models are expected to be twofold: firstly, they offer a structural foundation to researchers and developers seeking to produce useful cartographic UIs for tourism-related mLBS applications; and secondly, they provide guidance regarding specific cartographic representation, presentation and interaction techniques that offer utility and usability in particular contexts. In addition, a number of secondary research outputs offer other benefits to the scientific and commercial mLBS communities. These include the UCD research methodology – which presents a proven guide for ensuring usefulness during the design of mLBS applications in general – and a set of general recommendations for designing useful mLBS applications – which offer assistance for specific design activities while contributing empirical results to the future development of mLBS application design guidelines

Proceedings of the GIS Research UK 18th Annual Conference GISRUK 2010

This volume holds the papers from the 18th annual GIS Research UK (GISRUK). This year the conference, hosted at University College London (UCL), from Wednesday 14 to Friday 16 April 2010. The conference covered the areas of core geographic information science research as well as applications domains such as crime and health and technological developments in LBS and the geoweb. UCL’s research mission as a global university is based around a series of Grand Challenges that affect us all, and these were accommodated in GISRUK 2010. The overarching theme this year was “Global Challenges”, with specific focus on the following themes: * Crime and Place * Environmental Change * Intelligent Transport * Public Health and Epidemiology * Simulation and Modelling * London as a global city * The geoweb and neo-geography * Open GIS and Volunteered Geographic Information * Human-Computer Interaction and GIS Traditionally, GISRUK has provided a platform for early career researchers as well as those with a significant track record of achievement in the area. As such, the conference provides a welcome blend of innovative thinking and mature reflection. GISRUK is the premier academic GIS conference in the UK and we are keen to maintain its outstanding record of achievement in developing GIS in the UK and beyond

Towards BIM/GIS interoperability: A theoretical framework and practical generation of spaces to support infrastructure Asset Management

The past ten years have seen the widespread adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM) among both the Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) and the Asset Management/ Facilities Management (AM/FM) communities. This has been driven by the use of digital information to support collaborative working and a vision for more efficient reuse of data. Within this context, spatial information is either held in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models in a Common Data Environment (CDE). However, these being heterogeneous systems, there are inevitable interoperability issues that result in poor integration. For this thesis, the interoperability challenges were investigated within a case study to ask: Can a better understanding of the conceptual and technical challenges to the integration of BIM and GIS provide improved support for the management of asset information in the context of a major infrastructure project? Within their respective fields, the terms BIM and GIS have acquired a range of accepted meanings, that do not align well with each other. A seven-level socio-technical framework is developed to harmonise concepts in spatial information systems. This framework is used to explore the interoperability gaps that must be resolved to enable design and construction information to be joined up with operational asset information. The Crossrail GIS and BIM systems were used to investigate some of the interoperability challenges that arise during the design, construction and operation of an infrastructure asset. One particular challenge concerns a missing link between AM-based information and CAD-based geometry which hinders engineering assets from being located within the geometric model and preventing geospatial analysis. A process is developed to link these CAD-based elements with AM-based assets using defined 3D spaces to locate assets. However, other interoperability challenges must first be overcome; firstly, the extraction, transformation and loading of geometry from CAD to GIS; secondly, the creation of an explicit representation of each 3D space from the implicit enclosing geometry. This thesis develops an implementation of the watershed transform algorithm to use real-world Crossrail geometry to generate voxelated interior spaces that can then be converted into a B-Rep mesh for use in 3D GIS. The issues faced at the technical level in this case study provide insight into the differences that must also be addressed at the conceptual level. With this in mind, this thesis develops a Spatial Information System Framework to classify the nature of differences between BIM, GIS and other spatial information systems