Exploring the market potential for geo-ICT companies in relation to INSPIRE

Ponencias, comunicaciones y pósters presentados en el 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science "Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place", celebrado en la Universitat Jaume I del 3 al 6 de junio de 2014.The implementation of INSPIRE can bring new and interesting business opportunities to European geo-ICT companies. Until now, little information has been available on the participation of geo-ICT companies in the implementation of INSPIRE. This paper seeks to explore the market potential for geo-ICT companies in relation to INSPIRE, presenting the results of a large-scale survey among geo-ICT companies in Europe. The paper shows that the majority of geo-ICT companies in Europe is not actively involved in the implementation of INSPIRE. Having knowledge and understanding of the technical details of INSPIRE seems to be a key requirement for companies to get involved in INSPIRE. Companies that fulfil this requirement and have supported public authorities in implementing INSPIRE, have experienced an impact of INSPIRE on their innovative performance

An End-to-End Solution for Enabling Urban Cyclability: The Bike2Work Experience

Mobility plays a fundamental role in modern cities. How citizens experience the city, access its core services, and participate in city life, strongly depends on its mobility organization and efficiency. The challenges that municipalities face are very ambitious: on the one hand, administrators must guarantee their citizens the right to mobility and to easily access local services; on the other hand, they need to minimize the economic, social, and environmental costs of the mobility system. Municipalities are increasingly facing problems of traffic congestion, road safety, energy dependency and air pollution, and therefore encouraging a shift towards sustainable mobility habits based on active mobility is of central importance. Active modes, such as cycling, should be particularly encouraged, especially for local recurrent journeys (i.e., home-to-school, home-to-work). In this context, addressing and mitigating commuter-generated traffic requires engaging public and private stakeholders through innovative and collaborative approaches that focus not only on supply (e.g., roads and vehicles) but also on transportation demand management. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end solution for enabling urban cyclability. It supports the companies' Mobility Managers (MMs) acting on the promotion of active mobility for home-to-work commuting, helps the city administrators to understand the needed urban planning interventions, and motivates the citizens to sustainable mobility. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution we developed two analyses: the first to accurately analyze the user experience and any behaviour change related to the BIKE2WORK initiative, and the second to demonstrate how exploiting the collected data we can inform and possible guide the involved municipality (i.e., Ferrara, a city in Northern Italy) in improving the urban cyclability.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure

Location data for buildings related energy efficiency policies

Based on the priority currently given by the European Union to the energy efficiency topic through its Energy Union Package, this feasibility study has focused on the role of location data in support of energy efficiency policies, taking into account the requirements of INSPIRE, EPBD and EED Directives, as well as the CoM initiative. The EU Member States are already due to implement such Directives according to different roadmaps, but there are benefits to be gained from a coherent and consistent approach. Moreover, data is not always available in consistent form and with good quality. The monitoring and reporting requirements set by the CoM need real data and models, that can be used and that should work consistently across different administrative levels. The analysis reported in this document support these statement, showing that there is lack of data quality and reliability. These aspects might hinder the effective application of the energy efficiency policies at the municipal, district and national level. Geospatial technologies in general and accurate location data in particular can support this field, because they can significantly support efficient processes related to data collection, elaboration and communication to be executed in all the phases of energy efficiency policies life cycle; and effective decision-making. INSPIRE has a role to play as it can provide common data models and common data access rules adopted by all EU MS and a roadmap to provide interoperable datasets of high relevance with energy efficiency. The study has identified areas of development and analysis that can be useful to fill the recognised “data gap”, and proposed an initial pilot activity as a start-up project to investigate concretely these ideas with a limited number of pilot citiesJRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Dat

DEVELOPMENT OF THE CITYGML APPLICATION DOMAIN EXTENSION ENERGY FOR URBAN ENERGY SIMULATION

ABSTRACT No widely applicable open information model standard exists until now for large-scale Urban Energy Modelling. Although different data models have been developed for different urban energy tools, they do not offer possibilities of interoperability and exchange between the stakeholders, tools and expert fields. To address this issue, an international group of urban energy simulation developers and users is developing since May 2014 an Application Domain Extension (ADE) Energy for the open urban information model CityGML. This paper introduces the Energy ADE developed and tested by this international urban energy group. Goals, requirements and the modular structure of the CityGML extension are described in detail

BIKE2WORK: A Shift Towards Sustainable Mobility

Encouraging a shift towards sustainable mobility habits based on active mobility is a key challenge for many cities, since they are increasingly facing problems of traffic congestion, road safety, energy dependency and air pollution. Active modes, as cycling, which are also the least polluting, should be particularly encouraged, especially for local recurrent journeys (i.e., home–to–school, home–to–work). In this context, addressing and mitigating commuter-generated traffic requires engaging public and private stakeholders through new innovative and collaborative approaches that focus not only on supply (e.g., roads and vehicles), but also on transportation demand management. In this paper we propose an approach to home–to–work mobility able to support the company Mobility Manager (MM) acting on the promotion of sustainable mobility and transport demand management by analysing the problems, needs and habits of employees, and trying to orient them towards new sustainable transport hab its

Are Italian cities already 15-minute? Presenting the Next Proximity Index: A novel and scalable way to measure it, based on open data

In recent years, the concept of proximity has gathered significant attention and the best-known model dealing with this concept is Carlos Moreno's 15-minute city, where citizens can easily reach any essential service through a 15 minutes’ walk (or bike ride). This city model presents numerous advantages, including reductions in car traffic and carbon footprint, improvement in citizens' health and safety, enhancement of the economy in the whole city, improvement of accessibility and so on. However, transitioning to a 15-minute city is not a straightforward undertaking and we argue that for this process to succeed it is best to rely on data-driven assessments of its developments. Therefore, in this paper we present the NExt proXimity Index (NEXI), based on open data and capable of measuring the level of local proximity to services by walking, according to the principles of the 15-minute city. The goal of NEXI is to identify which of the different areas of a given territory already follow the 15-minute paradigm and its implementation is made available as an interactive map where the index is computed on a hexagonal grid and thematized according to its value. The NEXI is designed to be glocal: it is based on OpenStreetMap data so it can be replicated everywhere (global), but it is also granular enough to be able to evaluate the proximity at a small scale (local). Moreover, the index is designed to have a scalable computation and is in fact already available for the entirety of Italy. Finally, the NEXI can be combined with additional local data (e.g. population level) to gather additional insights, as was experimented in two use cases carried out in the cities of Ferrara and Bologna, Italy

Design of the Data Transformation Architecture for the INSPIRE Data Model Browser

The INSPIRE directive requires that inside a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) data are provided using a model compliant with the INSPIRE Data Model (IDM). Therefore, one of the main issues during the implementation of an SDI is the transformation of existing source databases in the way defined by the IDM. In literature, many aspects of the INSPIRE transformation problem have been studied and classified, this paper deals with the definition of the transformation architecture and the schema transformation levels

Servizio di gestione dei dati energetici degli edifici proposto nel Progetto Sunshine Meter and Sensor Data Management Service for Buildings proposed in the context of Project Sunshine

Nell'ambito dello sviluppo della piattaforma SUNSHINE (www.sunshineproject.eu), dedicata allo sviluppo di servizi informativi a supporto di una gestione energetica più efficiente di edifici e impianti di illuminazione, è stato sviluppato un servizio di Sensor Data Management che estende le comuni funzionalità di meter data management dei dati di lettura di consumi al management di dati che provengono più genericamente da sensori di diverso tipo. I pilot del progetto SUNSHINE forniscono in-fatti non solo i dati relativi al consumo energetico (elettricità, gas, teleriscaldamento, etc), ma anche altri tipi di dati (ad es. le condizioni meteo esterne agli edifici e la tempe-ratura interna) che pure necessitano di essere raccolti e gestiti. Tutte queste diverse tipologie di dati sono memorizzate nello stesso database e ge-stite attraverso procedure comuni e seguendo protocolli di comunicazione standard che saranno descritti in questo articolo.During the development of SUNSHINE’s platform (www.sunshineproject.eu), aimed at developing information services to support a more energy-efficient manage-ment of buildings and light lines, a Sensor Data Management Service has been imple-mented extending the simple management of smart metering data to the management of data coming more generally from heterogeneous sensors. The reason being that SUN-SHINE’s pilots are providing not just consumption data (electricity, gas heating, district heating, etc), but also other types of data (e.g. weather or indoor temperature) that also need to be collected and managed. All these data types are stored in the same database and managed with common procedures and conforming to standard communication protocols which will be de-scribed in this paper