Developing a goal-oriented SDI assessment approach using GIDEON - the Dutch SDI implementation strategy - as a case study

In 2008, the Dutch government approved the GIDEON document as a policy aiming at the implementation of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) in the Netherlands. The execution of GIDEON should take place by pursuing seven implementation strategies which lead to the achievement of the GIDEON goals. GIDEON also expresses the need to monitor the progress of implementing its strategies and realization of its goals. Currently, the work has been started on monitoring the GIDEON implementation strategies. However, there is still a lack of knowledge and methods to monitor GIDEON goals realization. The challenge is to come up with an approach to assess to what extent these goals are achieved. As a response to the challenge of assessing the GIDEON goals, this paper explores the possibility of using the Multi-view SDI assessment framework (Grus et al., 2007). This paper presents and discusses the method that applies the Multi-view SDI assessment framework, its indicators and measurement methods to create a GIDEON assessment approach. The method of creating a GIDEON assessment approach consists of several procedural steps: formulating specific GIDEON objectives, organizing a one-day workshop involving focus group of specific stakeholders responsible for creation and execution of NSDI, asking the workshop participants to select from a long list those indicators that best measure the achievement of each GIDEON goals. The key step of GIDEON approach is a one-day workshop. The workshop participants represented all organizations that cooperated and/or created GIDEON. The workshop consisted of two parts: first part explained the context of a challenge of assessing GIDEON, second part included participants activity to select and come to the consensus on the list of indicators that would best measure GIDEON goals realization. Additionally, the participants were asked to evaluate and express feedback on the usefulness of the method of creating GIDEON assessment approach. The results show that several indicators that relate to specific SDI goals could be selected by a significant number of workshop participants. The indicators that have been selected are not the final ones yet, but provide a guideline and form a base of what has to be measured when assessing GIDEON goals. Involving the representatives of all parties committed to GIDEON into the process of GIDEON assessment approach creation will strengthen its robustness and acceptance. The results of the feedback form filled by each participant show that the presented method is useful or very useful to create GIDEON assessment approach. Additionally, some of the participants provided already their own indicators which are very specific for Dutch SDI monitoring.The method presented in this research, assuming that SDI goals are defined and the organizations that participate in SDI creation are known, can be applied in any other country to develop country-specific and practical SDI assessment approach

Emergency nurses' requirements for disaster preparedness

Background: Natural and man-made disasters affect people, communities, and health systems. Nurses play a key role in the health system and must be prepared for appropriate response in disasters. Objectives: This study was done to assess the current knowledge of nurses in emergency departments for disaster preparedness. Patients and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 110 emergency nurses working in teaching hospitals affiliated to Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. A questionnaire was used to collect data and the data were then analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics with SPSS software version 16.0. Results: Based on the findings, most of the participants (64.5) were aged 30 - 39 years old. 84 of the cases were female and 97.3 had a bachelor's degree. The average perceived knowledge of nurses was 2.43 ± 1.01. The nurses had the highest familiarity with triage and lowest knowledge in epidemiology and decision-making. Conclusions: Lack knowledge of nurses regarding response to disaster situations indicates inefficiencies in the current system. Therefore, it is recommended to organize more workshops, annual training courses, and maneuvers based on staff needs and formulate continuous education courses for nurses. Copyright © 2015, Trauma Monthly

Rethinking the U-Net, ResUnet, and U-Net3+ architectures with dual skip connections for building footprint extraction

The importance of building footprints and their inventory has been recognised as foundational spatial information for multiple societal problems. Extracting complex urban buildings involves the segmentation of very high-resolution (VHR) earth observation (EO) images. U-Net is a common deep learning network and foundation for its new incarnations like ResUnet, U-Net++ and U-Net3+ for such segmentation. The re-incarnations look for efficiency gain by re-designing the skip connection component and exploiting the multi-scale features in U-Net. However, skip connections do not always improve these networks and context information is lost in the multi-scale features. In this paper, we propose three novel dual skip connection mechanisms for U-Net, ResUnet, and U-Net3+. This deepens the feature maps forwarded by the skip connections to find a more accurate trade-off between context and localisation within these networks. The mechanisms are evaluated on feature maps of different scales in the three networks, producing nine new network configurations. The networks are evaluated against their original vanilla versions using four building footprint datasets (three existing and one new) of different spatial resolutions: VHR (0.3m), high-resolution (1m and 1.2m), and multi-resolution (0.3+0.6+1.2m). The proposed mechanisms report efficiency gain on five evaluation measures for U-Net and ResUnet, and up to 17.7% and 18.4% gain in F1 score and Intersection over Union (IoU) for U-Net3+. The codes will be available in a GitHub link after peer review.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Investigating pedestrians’ obstacle avoidance behaviour

Modelling and simulating pedestrian motions are standard ways to investigate crowd dynamics aimed to enhance pedestrians’ safety. Movement of people is affected by interactions with one another and with the physical environment that it may be a worthy line of research. This paper studies the impact of speed on how pedestrians respond to the obstacles (i.e. Obstacles avoidance behaviour). A field experiment was performed in which a group of people were instructed to perform some obstacles avoidance tasks at two levels of normal and high speeds. Trajectories of the participants are extracted from the video recordings for the subsequent intentions:(i) to seek out the impact of total speed, x and yaxis (ii) to observe the impact of the speed on the movement direction, x-axis, (iii) to find out the impact of speed on the lateral direction, y-axis. The results of the experiments could be used to enhance the current pedestrian simulation models

Hierarchical Spatial Reasoning Applied to Spatial Data Infrastructures

Many countries throughout the world believe they can benefit both economically and environmentally from better management of their spatial data assets, enabling them to access and retrieve complete and consistent datasets in an easy and secure way. This has resulted in the development of the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) concept at various political and/or administrative levels. The SDI concept has been represented by different descriptions of its nature, however, currently these demonstrate an overly-simplistic understanding of the concept. The simplicity in existing definitions has been slow to incorporate the concept of an integrated, multilevelled SDI formed from a hierarchy of inter-connected SDIs at corporate, local, state/provincial, national, regional (multi-national) and global (GSDI) levels. Failure to incorporate this multidimensionality, and the dynamic mechanistic and functional roles of the SDI have rendered many descriptions of SDI inadequate to describe the complexity and the dynamics of SDI as it develops,and thus ultimately constrain SDI achieving developmental potential in the future. As a result, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate the fitness and applicability of Hierarchical Spatial Reasoning (HSR) as a theoretical framework to demonstrate the multi-dimensional nature of SDIs. It is argued that by better understanding and demonstrating the nature of an SDI hierarchy, any SDI development can gain support from a wider community of both government and nongovernment data users and providers. The findings presented in this paper build on the authors experiences in Regional SDI (multi-national) development and HSR

Understanding land administration systems

This is a preprint of a paper from 14th PCGIAP Meeting (International Seminar on Land Administration Trends & Issues in Asia & The Pacific Region), 19-20 August 2008. http://www.csdila.unimelb.edu.au/projects/PCGIAPLASeminar/index.html.19-20 August 200

3D Cadastre visualization and dissemination: Most recent progresses and future directions

The 3D Cadastre has been investigated from many viewpoints (including legal, organizational and technical). However, to date little research has focused specifically on visualizationrelated aspects despite the value-added of the third dimension. The paper first proposes an overview of progress made in the last five years in 3D cadastral visualization. The authors then summarize discussions at the 2014 3D Cadastre workshop regarding future research and development on the topic. This synthesis is complemented by a broad review of the most recent advances in 3D visualization beyond the 3D cadastral domain, with the goal of providing a number of important directions for further work, allowing researchers, developers and users to consolidate their respective activities, and encouraging collaboration

Spatially Enabled society

The term ‘spatially enabled society’ describes the emerging cultural and governance revolution offered by pervasive spatial information technologies and spatially equipped citizens. Spatially enabled societies make possible, amongst many other things, sustainable cities,early warning systems e.g. in relation to the global financial crisis, smarter delivery of housing, improved risk management, and better macroeconomic decision making. This article introduces the current international discussion around the evolving concept of ‘spatially enabled society’. The concept is not about managing spatial information - it is about managing information, or governing society, spatially

Spatially Enabled society

The term ‘spatially enabled society’ describes the emerging cultural and governance revolution offered by pervasive spatial information technologies and spatially equipped citizens. Spatially enabled societies make possible, amongst many other things, sustainable cities,early warning systems e.g. in relation to the global financial crisis, smarter delivery of housing, improved risk management, and better macroeconomic decision making. This article introduces the current international discussion around the evolving concept of ‘spatially enabled society’. The concept is not about managing spatial information - it is about managing information, or governing society, spatially