WEB MAPPING ARCHITECTURES BASED ON OPEN SPECIFICATIONS AND FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN THE WATER DOMAIN

The availability of water-related data and information across different geographical and jurisdictional scales is of critical importance for the conservation and management of water resources in the 21st century. Today information assets are often found fragmented across multiple agencies that use incompatible data formats and procedures for data collection, storage, maintenance, analysis, and distribution. The growing adoption of Web mapping systems in the water domain is reducing the gap between data availability and its practical use and accessibility. Nevertheless, more attention must be given to the design and development of these systems to achieve high levels of interoperability and usability while fulfilling different end user informational needs. This paper first presents a brief overview of technologies used in the water domain, and then presents three examples of Web mapping architectures based on free and open source software (FOSS) and the use of open specifications (OS) that address different users' needs for data sharing, visualization, manipulation, scenario simulations, and map production. The purpose of the paper is to illustrate how the latest developments in OS for geospatial and water-related data collection, storage, and sharing, combined with the use of mature FOSS projects facilitate the creation of sophisticated interoperable Web-based information systems in the water domain

USER GEOLOCATED CONTENT ANALYSIS FOR URBAN STUDIES: INVESTIGATING MOBILITY PERCEPTION AND HUBS USING TWITTER

The availability of content constantly generated within theWeb has resulted in an incredibly rich virtual social environment from which it is possible to retrieve almost any sort of information. Since the advent of the social media connection with location-based services, this information has attracted the interest of manifold disciplines connected to the spatial data science. In this context, we introduce the URBAN-GEO BIG DATA (URBAN GEOmatics for Bulk Information Generation, Data Assessment and Technology Awareness), a Project of National Interest funded by the Italian Ministry of Education that aims at contributing to the exploitation of heterogeneous geodata sources such as VGI, geo-crowdsourcing, earth observation, etc. for a better understanding of urban dynamics. The presented work tackles one of the tasks requested by the project, which is connected to an investigation of the use of Twitter as a geodata source for retrieving valuable insights on the citizens’ interaction with mobility services and hubs. The study refers to five Italian cities, namely Milan, Turin, Padua, Rome, and Naples. Data collection is performed through the use of the Twitter streaming application programming interface. Collected data is analyzed by means of natural language processing techniques with Python. Results include a) extractions of mobility-related tweets presented by means of maps enabling the exploration of their spatial distribution within the cities, and b) a classification of the mobility-related tweets by means of sentiment analysis, allowing to investigate citizens’ perceptions of mobility services. A light and reproducible procedure to achieve these results is also outlined. In general terms, the results are intended for providing snapshots of the citizen interaction with both mobility infrastructure and services enabling a better description of mobility patterns and habits within the studied cities. The work leverages the geo-crowdsourced data within the traditional urban management practices in Italy and investigates the benefits, drawbacks, limitations connected to these data sources, which is the ultimate goal of the URBAN-GEO BIG DATA project

Educating on migration: the MIGRATE game

Having typically the main purpose of finding a better place to live in, migrations have played a constant role in the whole history of the humankind. Over the last few years, the increased phenomenon of migration from Africa and Middle East to the countries of Southern Europe has begun to personally affect the daily lives of many European citizens and to remarkably increase the attention on media and public opinion. However, how much do people living in the hosting countries really know about the nature, extent and scope of migration? Do they have a correct perception of this phenomenon or is their perception affected by fear and misconceptions? Answering such questions is among the objectives of MIGRATE (MIGRation pATtterns in Europe). MIGRATE (http://geomobile.como.polimi.it/migrate) was funded by the European Commission – Joint Research Centre (JRC) through the third call of MYGEOSS project, having the purpose of developing smart Internet applications informing European citizens on the changes affecting their environment (http://digitalearthlab.jrc.ec.europa.eu/activities/mygeoss-applications-your-environment/57752). MIGRATE is a Web Mapping application designed using a gamification approach with the main purpose of educating and raising awareness about migration in Europe

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE AND OPEN EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL ON LAND COVER MAPS INTERCOMPARISON AND VALIDATION

Land Cover (LC) maps represent key resources to understand, model and address many global and local dynamics affecting our planet. They are usually derived from the classification of satellite imagery, after which a validation or intercomparison process is performed to assess their accuracy. This paper presents the project “Capacity Building for High-Resolution Land Cover Intercomparison and Validation”, an educational initiative funded by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and mainly targeting developing countries. First, with the help of two open surveys, an analysis of the state of the art was performed which assessed the overall good awareness on LC maps and the needs and requirements for validating and comparing them, as well as the rich availability of educational material on this topic. The second task, currently under finalization, is the development of new educational material, based on open source software and released under an open access license, consisting of: an introduction to the GlobeLand30 (GL30) LC map and its online platform; a desktop GIS procedure showing two use cases on GL30 validation; and an application to collect LC data on the field to be used for validation. Finally, this educational material will be tested in practice in three workshops during the second half of the project, two of which held in developing countries: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya

DIGITAL EARTH OBSERVATION INFRASTRUCTURES AND INITIATIVES: A REVIEW FRAMEWORK BASED ON OPEN PRINCIPLES

Recent years have seen a tremendous increase of digital Earth Observation (EO) infrastructures, which provide web-based environments for accessing and processing data in a highly automated and scalable way. However, the current landscape of EO infrastructures and initiatives is fragmented, with various levels of user on-boarding and uptake success. The current work aims to make sense of this complex landscape by providing two main contributions. First, it offers a classification scheme used to review and analyse more than 150 EO infrastructures and initiatives. Then, adopting a user-centric perspective, the main limitations and obstacles currently faced by users when working with the existing EO platforms are identified. For each of these limitations, we propose a number of good practices that could benefit, from a user point of view, the design and functioning of EO platforms. Some technological enablers, i.e. specific resources (such as software components, standards and data encodings) that emerged from the analysis as holding a great potential for improving the usability of existing EO platforms, are finally listed. The work aims to provide a first scientific insight on how to best design and operate EO platforms to maximise the benefits of their user communities

Multidimensional Visualization and Processing of Big Open Urban Geospatial Data on theWeb

The focus of this research is addressing a subset of the geovisualization (i.e., geographic visualization) challenges identified in the literature, namely multidimensional vector and raster geospatial data visualization. Moreover, the work implements an approach for multidimensional raster geospatial data processing. The results of this research are provided through a geoportal comprised of multiple applications that are related to 3D visualization of cities, ground deformation, land use and land cover and mobility. In a subset of the applications, the datasets handled are considered to be large in volume. The geospatial data were visualized on dynamic and interactive virtual globes to enable visual exploration. The geoportal is available on the web to enable cross-platform access to it. Furthermore, the geoportal was developed employing open standards, free and open source software (FOSS) and open data, most importantly to ensure interoperability and reduce the barriers to access it. The geoportal brings together various datasets, different both in terms of context and format employing numerous technologies. As a result, the existing web technologies for geovisualization and geospatial data processing were examined and exemplary and innovative software was developed to extend the state of the art

VISUALIZATION OF VGI DATA THROUGH THE NEW NASA WEB WORLD WIND VIRTUAL GLOBE

GeoWeb 2.0, laying the foundations of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) systems, has led to platforms where users can contribute to the geographic knowledge that is open to access. Moreover, as a result of the advancements in 3D visualization, virtual globes able to visualize geographic data even on browsers emerged. However the integration of VGI systems and virtual globes has not been fully realized. The study presented aims to visualize volunteered data in 3D, considering also the ease of use aspects for general public, using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The new Application Programming Interface (API) of NASA, Web World Wind, written in JavaScript and based on Web Graphics Library (WebGL) is cross-platform and cross-browser, so that the virtual globe created using this API can be accessible through any WebGL supported browser on different operating systems and devices, as a result not requiring any installation or configuration on the client-side, making the collected data more usable to users, which is not the case with the World Wind for Java as installation and configuration of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is required. Furthermore, the data collected through various VGI platforms might be in different formats, stored in a traditional relational database or in a NoSQL database. The project developed aims to visualize and query data collected through Open Data Kit (ODK) platform and a cross-platform application, where data is stored in a relational PostgreSQL and NoSQL CouchDB databases respectively

EXTRACTION AND VISUALIZATION OF 3D BUILDING MODELS IN URBAN AREAS FOR FLOOD SIMULATION

Floods pose a risk that is likely to worsen in the future due to climate change. Therefore, it is essential that decision makers and domain experts have the tools to evaluate the effects of floods. We developed a tool that visualizes the earth and buildings in three dimensions to simulate floods so that effective strategies can be developed to enhance resilience and mitigate the effects of floods. We opted to use open standards and free and open source software (FOSS) for Web to maximize interoperability, replicability, reusability, and accessibility. As a result of the literature review, we decided to use CityGML and CesiumJS for three-dimensional geospatial data visualization. However, as CityGML data is not available for the cities that our project focuses on, we developed software called shp2city that converts Esri shapefile to CityGML data in LOD1 or LOD2. Moreover, as CityGML data cannot be immediately used with CesiumJS, we used 3DCityDB to store, represent, and manage the CityGML data; 3DCityDB Importer/Exporter to export the CityGML data in KML/COLLADA/glTF format to be used within the 3DCityDB Web-Map-Client that is based on CesiumJS for visualization. Finally, we simulated floods to aid in the informed decision-making process regarding adaptation measures and mitigation of flooding effects