The Development of an E-Participation Platform for Rural Areas in the Study Area of Niedernhall

The participation methods changed in recent years with the evolution of communication methods in general. It goes from an analog approach to a more information technology-based concept. This new form of participation is called e-Participation. With this new form of participation, the process opens up for different new technologies.The emergence of 3D Web-visualisation technologies presents themselves as an interesting application in the participation field. Especially regarding planning participation. Different examples introduce this concept in big cities andare based on open 3D city model data.However, there is also a need for this participation concept in a smaller urban area. This paper shows a way to provide an easy to access 3D model of areas in Baden-Württemberg for participation processes. In this paper, the system was tested with a trial run in a small village where the parish council was asked to design a public place. The platform provided them with functionalities to design in the 3D environment on the web globe. These functionalities were introduced to the council at an on-site appointment. This proves the technical validity of the project. The usability and acceptance of this method by the council will be determined by a questionnaire at a later stage in the project

A Method for Assessing Regional Bioenergy Potentials Based on GIS Data and a Dynamic Yield Simulation Model

The assessment of regional bioenergy potentials from different types of natural land cover is an integral part of simulation tools that aim to assess local renewable energy systems. This work introduces a new workflow, which evaluates regional bioenergy potentials and its impact on water demand based on geographical information system (GIS)-based land use data, satellite maps on local crop types and soil types, and conversion factors from biomass to bioenergy. The actual annual biomass yield of crops is assessed through an automated process considering the factors of local climate, crop type, soil, and irrigation. The crop biomass yields are validated with historic statistical data, with deviation less than 7% in most cases. Additionally, the resulting bioenergy potentials yield between 10.7 and 12.0 GWh/ha compared with 13.3 GWh/ha from other studies. The potential contribution from bioenergy on the energy demand were investigated in the two case studies, representing the agricultural-dominant rural area in North Germany and suburban region in South Germany: Simulation of the future bioenergy potential for 2050 shows only smaller effects from climate change (less than 4%) and irrigation (below 3%), but the potential to cover up to 21% of the transport fuels demand in scenario supporting biodiesel and bioethanol for transportation

A GIS-Based Simulation Method for Regional Food Potential and Demand

A quantitative assessment of food-water-energy interactions is important to assess pathways and scenarios towards a holistically sustainable regional development. While a range of tools and methods exist that assess energetic demands and potentials on a regional scale, the same is not true for assessments of regional food demand and potential. This work introduces a new food simulation workflow to address local food potential and demand at the regional level, by extending an existing regional energy-water simulation platform. The goal of this work is to develop a GIS-based bottom-up approach to simulate regional food demand that can be linked to similarly GIS-based workflows assessing regional water demands and energetic demands and potentials. This allows us to study food-water-energy issues on a local scale. For this, a CityGML land use data model is extended with a feed and animal potential raster map as well as a soil type map to serve as the main inputs. The workflow simulates: (1) the vegetal and animal product food potentials by taking climate, crop type, soil type, organic farming, and food waste parameters into account; (2) the food demand of vegetal and animal products influenced by population change, body weight, age, human development index, and other indicators. The method is tested and validated in three German counties with various land use coverages. The results show that restricting land used exclusively for energy crop production is the most effective way to increase annual food production potential. Climate change by 2050 is expected to result in annual biomass yield changes between −4% and 2% depending on the region. The amount of animal product consumption is expected to rise by 16% by 2050, while 4% fewer vegetal products are excepted to be consumed

3D navigation system for 3D GIS

The needs for three-dimensional (3D) visualization and navigation within 3D-GIS environment are growing and expanding rapidly in a variety of fields. In a steady shift from traditional two-dimensional (2D) GIS toward 3D-GIS, a great amount of accurate 3D data sets (e.g. city models) have become necessary to be produced in a short period of time and provided widely on the market. This requires a number of specific issues to be investigated, e.g. 3D routing accuracy, appropriate means to visualize 3D spatial analysis, tools to effortlessly explore and navigate through large models in real time, with the correct texture and geometry. There had been a lot of study on 3D landscapes, urban and city models. The rapid advancement in science and technology had opened wide options for a change and development of current methods and concepts. Virtual Reality (VR) is one of those developments, which gives the sense of feel in virtual environment. It enables users to visualize, make query and exploring 3D data. Such system can, not only help laymen, who often have trouble in understanding or interpreting complex data, but they also can help experts in decision making. The objective of this paper is to discuss some initial requirements of the proposed solution towards 3D-GIS. Eventually, this paper will serve as a starting point for a more challenging research idea. The focus of this research is to investigate and implementing 3D navigation techniques and solutions for 3D-GIS. Investigation on the support of navigation in real world environment will be carried out. This will include a research on the benefits of using 3D network model (non-planar graph) compared to 2D, how to use visual landmarks in route descriptions and using 3D geometry to get more accurate routing (in buildings, or in narrow street, etc). And as for implementation, a GUI provides the users with means (e.g. fill-out forms) to specify SQL queries interact and visualize 3D outcomes in virtual reality environment. This has opened up the ability to distribute and navigate accurately in 3D virtual worlds. The initial study on Klang Valley will go through data conversion processes from different formats like Laser, VRML, CAD and Shape 3D in a first person view environment using a developed system using VRML, JAVA and .Net compiler. The dataset structure will be in the form of various 2D, 2.5D and 3D array of height fields

3D navigation system based on synthetic texturing

Navigation system is the order of the day to pilot people to their destination. This paper focuses on the uses of mobile devices such as PDA’s and smart phones without additional hardware to direct pedestrians based on synthetic texturing along with 3D modeling. Each façade is reconstructed by means of arraying small sized textures in respect to their geometries in different layers. In the process of texture generation cropping, rectifying, removing disturbing objects and exposure setting should be done in advance. Unlimited number of layers with different priorities and their horizontal and vertical pulse functions and texture files can be utilize d for creating a simple and square looking façade. Each 3D model is created by mapping the synthetic textures on the 3D geometries of each building’s 3D model

Graphical Abstraction and Progressive Transmission in Internet-based 3D-Geoinformationsystems

In summary, the aim of this research thesis is to fill a gap left by existing 3D GIS: the generation of a meaningful, interactive, three-dimensional presentation of a selected database, especially in terms of the graphical abstraction and progressive transfer in a heterogeneous network environment. The intention here is to expand the concept of an openly distributed GIS infrastructure of the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) [BüMc96] to three-dimensional geodata. In contrast to previous work such as [Lang99], the main goal is not to depict a virtual landscape and/or an urban region as photorealistically as possible. Rather, the visual processing of the database should strive to support the user’s information needs. In contrast to computer-graphics rendering, in which a geometric model is depicted on a two-dimensional surface in proper perspective, the goal of the visualization is to transmit information to the user [Fole92]. Apart from the actual rendering, this process also requires a selection procedure that decides which elements of a scene contribute to the information content. This kind of visualization is called graphical abstraction. In a heterogeneous network environment, the problem of resource-adaptive data transfer and visualization is second to the graphical abstraction problem. The question is not only how to suitably describe the selected data, but also how to develop an adequate data transfer that presents the viewer with an initial visual result as quickly as possible. Additional data can be transferred later. This progressive data transfer is crucial for the use of 3D data on the Internet [Ross98]. Core concepts and components of the 3D geodata server developed within this thesis are the development of a query-oriented data model for efficient analysis of topological relations in three-dimensional spatial data, and a method for evaluating the relevance of single feature based on a user specific query. Based on this, a method to generate a graphical abstraction of the query result is developed. In order to compress the resulting model, a compression technique for triangle meshes for progressive transmission is invented. These concepts are proofed by a prototypical implementation within a 3D geodata server