Spatial Data Infrastructures and the Semantic Web of Spatial Things in Australia

Spatial Data Infrastructures have recently become a crucial part of national infrastructures. Example users are governments using them to make informed policy decisions and the private sector using them in order to understand their customers better. It is estimated that Australian spatial industry revenue is in excess of $1.35 billion annually. The Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information in Australia is currently working with the Commonwealth, jurisdictions and the private sector to understand the research required in this area to support both the public and private sectors in their decision and policy making based upon these infrastructures. This paper presents an early perspective as to possible research areas in this field. An underlying theme that reoccurs in the research is the need to consider usability of such systems and the need to move beyond just data to orchestration of processes to obtain derived products

A Method to Provide High Volume Transaction Outputs Accessibility to Vision Impaired Using Layout Analysis

The Documents in the financial services, insurance, utilities, and government sectors typically require a high volume of PDF documents to be generated which are stored for presentment or archived for legal purposes. As high volume transactional output (HVTO) demands put increasing pressure on online presentment capabilities, accessibility has become a growing concern. In particular, access to these files proposes significant challenges when these documents are presented to visually impaired people using assistive technologies (i.e. screen readers). Since it is rare that all recipients are prepared to accept electronic delivery of their documents, a large portion of the documents is still printed as PDFs. In an online billing system, bills are sent to customers’ email accounts as attached PDF files or HTML links. These bills in the most cases are neither accessible through assistive technologies nor useable by vision-impaired customers. This paper provides a method for HVTO documents automatic transformation to an accessible and navigable Mark-up format such as XML or Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY)

Multilingual Text to Speech in embedded systems using RC8660

Most multilingual Test to Speech (TTS) systems are software applications which allow people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen the written material using computer. This paper describes an approach to make a multilingual TTS and embed it into the portable, low cost, and standalone embedded system to access and read electronic documents particularly in developing countries. There are several TTS such as Doubletalk, DECtalk, and Dolphin available in market, also there are some products using TTS such as Talking OCR, Bill Reader and Intel Reader, which are not affordable or multilingual. To design this system OMAP3530 an application processor board is considered as the hardware platform to process the language-independent parts of the application and RC8660 used as an integrated TTS processor

Poster: Context aware route determination model for mobile indoor navigation systems for vision impaired people

© 2016 Copyright the author(s). Way finding abilities of vision impaired (VI) people cannot be expected to be as same as that of people who use the vision as the primary sense so the route determination methods in travel AIDS for VI people needs to adopted accordingly. This study proposes an indoor route determination model which considers the built environment and user context as the priority factors instead of the distance. It will identify how the elements of a built environment affect the determination of a suitable path which maximizes safety and convenience in an unfamiliar environment and how this path does varies with the individual characteristics of VI people

Smart Camp: Building Scalable and Highly Available IT-Infrastructures

The Western Australian resources boom has created a demand for a large amount of domestic accommodations, known as mining camps. However, due to the absent infrastructure within the remote regions of Australia, the energy supply of these mining camps is expensive. In order to reduce the electricity consumption of the mining camps, the Smart Camp project was initiated. The system infrastructure consists of a home automation based controller, placed in each mining accommodation unit to reduce energy consumption, and a centralized management unit, coordinating the controllers. Due to the fact that the size and complexity of mining camps may grow over time, the provided infrastructure of the management unit has to be able to evolve. One possible solution is to design a system in the context of high availability and horizontal scalability. This paper proposes a horizontally scalable and high availability infrastructural concept, in the context of the Smart Camp project. This concept also utilizes cost effective open source solutions running on commodity hardware. Within the context of horizontal scalability and reliability, this paper provides an applied research outline of some of the real world considerations, such as open source based high availability, load balancing, and distributed database solutions

Layout Analysis for Scanned PDF and Transformation to the Structured PDF Suitable for Vocalization and Navigation

Information can include text, pictures and signatures that can be scanned into a document format, such as the Portable Document Format (PDF), and easily emailed to recipients around the world. Upon the document’s arrival, the receiver can open and view it using a vast array of different PDF viewing applications such as Adobe Reader and Apple Preview. Hence, today the use of the PDF has become pervasive. Since the scanned PDF is an image format, it is inaccessible to assistive technologies such as a screen reader. Therefore, the retrieval of the information needs Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The OCR software scans the scanned PDF file and through text extraction generates an editable text formatted document. This text document can then be edited, formatted, searched and indexed as well as translated or converted to speech. A problem that the OCR software does not solve is the accurate regeneration of the full text layout. This paper presents a technology that addresses this issue by closely preserving the original textual layout of the scanned PDF using the open source document analysis and OCR system (OCRopus) based on geometric layout and positioning information. The main issues considered in this research are the preservation of the correct reading order, and the representation of common logical structured elements such as section headings, line breaks, paragraphs, captions, and sidebars, foot-bars, running headers, embedded images, graphics, tables and mathematical expressions

A method to provide high volume transaction outputs accessibility to vision Impaired using layout analysis

The Documents in the financial services, insurance, utilities, and government sectors typically require a high volume of PDF documents to be generated which are stored for presentment or archived for legal purposes. As high volume transactional output (HVTO) demands put increasing pressure on online presentment capabilities, accessibility has become a growing concern. In particular, access to these files proposes significant challenges when these documents are presented to visually impaired people using assistive technologies (i.e. screen readers). Since it is rare that all recipients are prepared to accept electronic delivery of their documents, a large portion of the documents is still printed as PDFs. In an online billing system, bills are sent to customers’ email accounts as attached PDF files or HTML links. These bills in the most cases are neither accessible through assistive technologies nor useable by vision-impaired customers. This paper provides a method for HVTO documents automatic transformation to an accessible and navigable Mark-up format such as XML or Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY)

Evaluating software inspection cognition levels using Blooms Taxonomy

This paper reports on results from a pilot study that used Bloom's Taxonomy to observe cognition levels during software inspections conducted by undergraduate computer science and software engineering students. Cognition levels associated with three different code inspection techniques were investigated. These were the Ad hoc, Abstraction Driven, and Checklist-based reading strategies. Higher cognition levels were observed when using inspection techniques that utilise a more structured reading process. This result highlights the importance of introducing novice programmers to structured code reading strategies. Findings suggest that teaching different software inspection techniques throughout software courses, beginning with structured techniques, is an excellent way to build a student's critical software reading and analysis skills

The significance of participant experience when evaluating software inspection techniques

Software inspections have been used to improve software quality for 30 years. The Checklist Based Reading strategy has traditionally been the most prevalent reading strategy. Increased Object Oriented usage has raised questions regarding this techniques efficacy, given issues such as delocalisation. This study compared two inspection techniques: Use-Case Reading and Usage-Based Reading, with Checklist Based Reading. Students and industry professionals were recruited to participate in the study. The effectiveness of each reading strategy was analysed, and the effect experience had on inspection efficacy. The results showed no significant difference between inspection techniques,whether used by student or professional developers but a significant difference was identified between student and professional developers in applying the different techniques. Qualitative results highlighted the differences in ability between industry and students with respect to what each group considered important when inspecting and writing code. These results highlight the differences between student and industry professionals when applying inspections. Therefore, when selecting participants for empirical software engineering studies, participant experience level must be accounted for within the reporting of results