Development of a server to manage a customised local version of OpenStreetMap in Ireland

In this paper we describe the software architecture of a prototype web-based GIS system for the deliver environmental research data in Ireland. The central component in this system is OpenStreetMap which provides the base layers of geographical data. An OpenStreetMap data collection campaign for our university town was carried out earlier this year yieldeding a spatially rich OpenStreetMap representation of Maynooth. Our server (OpenStreetMap database, supporting software, and specially generated map tiles) has been used by several GIS and location-based services projects in our department. One such example is a mobile device-based pedestrian navigation system is described in this paper. We describe some of the components of our server system. This includes a description of the management of the local copy of the OpenStreetMap database and the generation of sets of customised map tiles

Comparison of the accuracy of OpenStreetMap for Ireland with Google Maps and Bing Maps

We describe a comparison of the accuracy of OpenStreetMap for Ireland with Google Maps and Bing Maps. Five case study cities and towns are chosen for this comparison. Each mapping system is analysed for accuracy under three main headings: spatial coverage, currency, and ground-truth positional accuracy. We find that while there is no clear winner amongst the three mapping platforms each show individual differences and similarities for each of the case study locations. We believe the results described in this paper are useful for those developing Location-based services for countries such as Ireland where access to high-quality geospatial data is often prohibitively expensive or made difficult by other barriers such as lack of data or access restrictions

Comparison of the accuracy of OpenStreetMap for Ireland with Google Maps and Bing Maps

We describe a comparison of the accuracy of OpenStreetMap for Ireland with Google Maps and Bing Maps. Five case study cities and towns are chosen for this comparison. Each mapping system is analysed for accuracy under three main headings: spatial coverage, currency, and ground-truth positional accuracy. We find that while there is no clear winner amongst the three mapping platforms each show individual differences and similarities for each of the case study locations. We believe the results described in this paper are useful for those developing Location-based services for countries such as Ireland where access to high-quality geospatial data is often prohibitively expensive or made difficult by other barriers such as lack of data or access restrictions

Using a fully open source approach to working with OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is a very exciting and vibrant project aiming to make accessing geographic data easier. Our research group at the Department of Computer Science NUI Maynooth Ireland is carrying out research into a broad range of topics including: map data generalisation, geographic shape complexity, web map services, map-based interface for pedestrian navigation. One of the common themes across this research is the use of OpenStreetMap as the principal source of geospatial data. In this paper we describe how our research productivity, research collaboration, and general data interoperability have been greatly enhanced from our early adoption of a fully open source GIS approach to working with OpenStreetMap. While one can work successfully with OpenStreetMap in non-Open Source environments the flexibility offered by an open source approach is a major advantage. This flexibility is delivered in many flavours including: a wide choice of software, inter-connectability of software packages and components, a wide network of support through documentation, message boards, and free and open exchange of ideas

Using a fully open source approach to working with OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is a very exciting and vibrant project aiming to make accessing geographic data easier. Our research group at the Department of Computer Science NUI Maynooth Ireland is carrying out research into a broad range of topics including: map data generalisation, geographic shape complexity, web map services, map-based interface for pedestrian navigation. One of the common themes across this research is the use of OpenStreetMap as the principal source of geospatial data. In this paper we describe how our research productivity, research collaboration, and general data interoperability have been greatly enhanced from our early adoption of a fully open source GIS approach to working with OpenStreetMap. While one can work successfully with OpenStreetMap in non-Open Source environments the flexibility offered by an open source approach is a major advantage. This flexibility is delivered in many flavours including: a wide choice of software, inter-connectability of software packages and components, a wide network of support through documentation, message boards, and free and open exchange of ideas

Integrating Real-time Bus-Tracking with Pedestrian Navigation in a Journey Planning System

Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) systems provide real-time location information for emergency response, delivery services and freight transport. The advent of AVL systems has meant both public and private bus operators can implement systems to provide real-time passenger information, analyse their service performance and also to evaluate the quality of their operations. Traffic congestion, intersection delays, weather and operational conditions are some of the factors that make it difficult to predict the accurate bus arrival time in a real-time environment. In a joint project between NUI Maynooth and Blackpool Transport, a dynamic web application was developed to display and update vehicle locations (bustracking.co.uk) (Winstanley et al. 2009) and to provide predictive bus arrival times at stops. A journey by bus is usually part of a longer door-to-door itinerary, usually involving walking before, after or between bus segments. The passenger is really interested in door-to-door journey times when making decisions about time of departure and which bus to catch. Therefore journey planners that combine the pedestrian and bus journeys are required and indeed several such systems exist, such as Transport Direct (2009), Traveline Midlands (2009), Google transit (2009). However these systems are mainly designed to plan journeys in advance and so base their decisions on the fixed bus timetable. For last-minute planning, and also for updating journey plans as-you-go, real-time bus locations and short-term predictions of bus arrival times at stops can be used to give more reliable journey times taking into account delays due to congestion, diversions and other factors. This paper describes an experimental system that combines bus tracking and pedestrian navigation

Integrating Volunteered Geographic Information into Pervasive Health Computing Applications

In this paper we describe the potential for using Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in pervasive health computing. We use the OpenStreetMap project as a case-study of a successful VGI project and investigate how it can be expanded and used as a source of spatial information for pervasive computing technologies particularly in the area of access to information on healthcare services

Integrating Haptic Feedback to Pedestrian Navigation Applications

The development of a haptic-feedback enabled mobile application for pedestrian routing is described. One of the challenges presented to users of pedestrian navigation applications on mobile devices is the requirement that the user continuously interacts with the visual interface on the mobile device. Haptic feedback or haptics, is a technology that uses forced feedback, vibrations and/or motions to the user which are interpreted using our sense of touch. The haptic user interface, in our application, on a mobile device provides unobtrusive feedback in the form of vibration alarms to assist the user in navigating from one point to the other. The user can hold the mobile device discretely in their hand without the need to view the screen. For spatial data the OpenStreetMap (OSM) database is used while the Cloudmade routing API is used as the routing engine

Management of spatial data for visualization on mobile devices

Vector-based mapping is emerging as a preferred format in Location-based Services(LBS), because it can deliver an up-to-date and interactive map visualization. The Progressive Transmission(PT) technique has been developed to enable the ecient transmission of vector data over the internet by delivering various incremental levels of detail(LoD). However, it is still challenging to apply this technique in a mobile context due to many inherent limitations of mobile devices, such as small screen size, slow processors and limited memory. Taking account of these limitations, PT has been extended by developing a framework of ecient data management for the visualization of spatial data on mobile devices. A data generalization framework is proposed and implemented in a software application. This application can signicantly reduce the volume of data for transmission and enable quick access to a simplied version of data while preserving appropriate visualization quality. Using volunteered geographic information as a case-study, the framework shows exibility in delivering up-to-date spatial information from dynamic data sources. Three models of PT are designed and implemented to transmit the additional LoD renements: a full scale PT as an inverse of generalisation, a viewdependent PT, and a heuristic optimised view-dependent PT. These models are evaluated with user trials and application examples. The heuristic optimised view-dependent PT has shown a signicant enhancement over the traditional PT in terms of bandwidth-saving and smoothness of transitions. A parallel data management strategy associated with three corresponding algorithms has been developed to handle LoD spatial data on mobile clients. This strategy enables the map rendering to be performed in parallel with a process which retrieves the data for the next map location the user will require. A viewdependent approach has been integrated to monitor the volume of each LoD for visible area. The demonstration of a exible rendering style shows its potential use in visualizing dynamic geoprocessed data. Future work may extend this to integrate topological constraints and semantic constraints for enhancing the vector map visualization

3D oceanographic data compression using 3D-ODETLAP

This paper describes a 3D environmental data compression technique for oceanographic datasets. With proper point selection, our method approximates uncompressed marine data using an over-determined system of linear equations based on, but essentially different from, the Laplacian partial differential equation. Then this approximation is refined via an error metric. These two steps work alternatively until a predefined satisfying approximation is found. Using several different datasets and metrics, we demonstrate that our method has an excellent compression ratio. To further evaluate our method, we compare it with 3D-SPIHT. 3D-ODETLAP averages 20% better compression than 3D-SPIHT on our eight test datasets, from World Ocean Atlas 2005. Our method provides up to approximately six times better compression on datasets with relatively small variance. Meanwhile, with the same approximate mean error, we demonstrate a significantly smaller maximum error compared to 3D-SPIHT and provide a feature to keep the maximum error under a user-defined limit