Landscape and the Internet - 9 Papers in Future Internet Special Issue

We are pleased to announce a special issue of  Future Internet, Volume 3, Issue 4 (December 2011).  Focussed on Landscape and the Internet and edited by Dr. Christopher Pettit Principal Research Scientist and Research Manager, Spatial Information Sciences, Department of Primary Industries Victoria, Australia and Dr. Arzu Coltekin,Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 80750 Zürich, Switzerland, the issue represents a series of notable papers:

Table of Contents:

Olaf Schroth, Ellen Pond, Cam Campbell, Petr Cizek, Stephen Bohus and Stephen R. J. SheppardArticle: Tool or Toy? Virtual Globes in Landscape Planning Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 204-227; doi:10.3390/fi3040204
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/204/



Philip Paar and Jörg RekittkeArticle: Low-Cost Mapping and Publishing Methods for Landscape Architectural Analysis and Design in Slum-Upgrading Projects Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 228-247; doi:10.3390/fi3040228
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/228/



Mark Imhof, Matthew Cox, Angela Fadersen, Wayne Harvey, Sonia Thompson, David Rees and Christopher PettitArticle: Natural Resource Knowledge and Information Management via the Victorian Resources Online Website Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 248-280; doi:10.3390/fi3040248
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/248/



David Parsons, Ramesh Lal and Manfred Lange
Article: Test Driven Development: Advancing Knowledge by Conjecture and Confirmation
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 281-297; doi:10.3390/fi3040281
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/281/



Haifeng Li and Bo WuArticle: A Service-Oriented Architecture for Proactive Geospatial Information Services
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 298-318; doi:10.3390/fi3040298
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/298/



Subhash Sharma, Christopher Pettit, Ian Bishop, Pang Chan and Falak ShethArticle: An Online Landscape Object Library to Support Interactive Landscape Planning
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 319-343; doi:10.3390/fi3040319
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/319/



Saviour Formosa, Vincent Magri, Julia Neuschmid and Manfred SchrenkArticle: Sharing Integrated Spatial and Thematic Data: The CRISOLA Case for Malta and the European Project Plan4all Process Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 344-361; doi:10.3390/fi3040344
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/344/



Sabrina Lai and Corrado ZoppiArticle: An Ontology of the Strategic Environmental Assessment of City Masterplans 
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 362-378; doi:10.3390/fi3040362
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/362/



Arzu Coltekin and Tumasch ReichenbacherReview: High Quality Geographic Services and Bandwidth Limitations
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 379-396; doi:10.3390/fi3040379
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/379/


Full details can be found over at the Future Internet Journal. 

New Paper: An Internet of Old Things as an Augmented Memory System

Spinger have published, in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, a paper by Ralph Barthel, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Angelina Karpovich, Martin de Jode and Chris Speed based around our TOTeM/Internet of Things work. Entitled, An Internet of Old Things as an Augmented Memory System, the full abstract and download link are below:


Abstract


The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates new contexts for augmenting things with stories in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things (IoT). Tales of Things is a tagging system which, based on two-dimensional barcodes (also called Quick Response or QR codes) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, enables the capturing and sharing of object stories and the physical linking to objects via read and writable tags.

Within the context of our study, it has functioned as a technology probe which we employed with the aim to stimulate discussion and identify desire lines that point to novel design opportunities for the engagement with personal and social memories linked to everyday objects. In this paper, we discuss results from fieldwork with different community groups in the course of which seemingly any object could form the basis of a meaningful story and act as entry point into rich inherent ‘networks of meaning’. Such networks of meaning are often solely accessible for the owner of an object and are at risk of getting lost as time goes by. 


We discuss the different discourses that are inherent in these object stories and provide avenues for making these memories and meaning networks accessible and shareable. This paper critically reflects on Tales of Things as an example of an augmented memory system and discusses possible wider implications for the design of related systems.


http://www.springerlink.com/content/v8405w81p2j35451/

Building 3D Agent-Based Models for Urban Systems: CASA Working Paper 161

Number 161 in the every growing CASA Working Paper Series is Building 3D Agent-Based Models for Urban Systems by A.T. Crooks, A. Hudson-Smith and A Patel in a collaboration between George Mason University, United States of America and here at Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College London.

There is a growing interest in relating agent-based models to real- world locations by combining them with geographical information systems (GIS) which can be seen with the proliferation of geosimulation models in recent years. This coincides with the proliferation of digital data both in the two and three dimensions allowing one to construct detailed and extensive feature rich and highly visual 3D city models. This paper explores some of these developments in relation to our own initial work on building 3D geospatial agent-based models of urban systems and the technologies that allow for such models to be created. Furthermore, we highlight some techniques for the creation of 3D agent-based models and stress that such models are not a substitute to good models.

The intention of this paper is to explore the recent advances in computer technology, software and associated techniques that allow for the creation of 3D agent-based models which can be used to simulate various aspects of city life focusing on our own initial research of creating 3D cityscapes and 3D agent-based models. The remainder of this paper will therefore explore our attempts to use digital data to create feature rich 3D cityscapes (Section 2), discuss why such cityscapes are important for ABM (Section 3), before moving into how advances in computer hardware allow for the creation of 3D agent-based models (Section 4); we then briefly explore a potential application domain, that of pedestrian modelling (Section 5). Section 6 presents techniques which we are currently utilizing to create 3D agent-based models through various linking and coupling approaches along with advantage and disadvantages of each approach before a discussion is presented (Section 7).

Download the full paper (748k pdf).

Data Mash-Ups and the Future of Mapping: JISC Report

Over the past few months we have been working with colleagues here at CASA, University College London and at the University of Nottingham, in association with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to write a report on Data mash-ups and the future of mapping. We are pleased to say the report has just been released and is available to download.

Report by Suchith Anand, Michael Batty, Andrew Crooks, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Mike Jackson, Richard Milton, Jeremy Morley

Data Mash-Ups and the Future of Mapping

Executive Summary

The term 'mash-up' refers to websites that weave data from different sources into new Web services. The key to a successful Web service is to gather and use large datasets and harness the scale of the Internet through what is known as network effects. This means that data sources are just as important as the software that 'mashes' them, and one of the most profound pieces of data that a user has at any one time is his or her location. In the past this was a somewhat fuzzy concept, perhaps as vague as a verbal reference to being in a particular shop or café or an actual street address. Recent events, however, have changed this. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton's policy decision to open up military GPS satellite technology for 'dual-use' (military and civilian) resulted in a whole new generation of location-aware devices.Around the same time, cartography and GIScience were also undergoing dramatic, Internet-induced changes.

Traditional, resource intensive processes and established organizations, in both the public and private sectors, were being challenged by new, lightweight methods. The upshot has been that map making, geospatial analysis and related activities are undergoing a process of profound change. New players have entered established markets and disrupted routes to knowledge and, as we have already seen with Web 2.0, newly empowered amateurs are part of these processes. Volunteers are quite literally grabbing a GPS unit and hitting the streets of their local town to help create crowdsourced datasets that are uploaded to both open source and proprietary databases.

The upshot is an evolving landscape which Tim O'Reilly, proponent of Web 2.0 and always ready with a handy moniker, has labelled Where 2.0. Others prefer the GeoWeb, Spatial Data Infrastructure, Location Infrastructure, or perhaps just location based services. Whatever one might call it, there are a number of reasons why its development should be of interest to those in higher and further education. Firstly, since a person's location is such a profound unit of information and of such value to, for example, the process of targeting advertising, there has been considerable investment in Web 2.0-style services that make use of it. Understanding these developments may provide useful insights for how other forms of data might be used. Secondly, education, particularly research, is beginning to realize the huge potential of the data mash-up concept. As Government, too, begins to get involved, it is likely that education will be expected to take advantage of, and indeed come to relish, the new opportunities for working with data.

This TechWatch report describes the context for the changes that are taking place and explains why the education community needs to understand the issues around how to open up data, how to create mash-ups that do not compromise accuracy and quality and how to deal with issues such as privacy and working with commercial and non-profit third parties. It also shows how data mash-ups in education and research are part of an emerging, richer information environment with greater integration of mobile applications, sensor platforms, e-science, mixed reality, and semantic, machine-computable data and speculates on how this is likely to develop in the future.

There are two versions for download: the first is an optimised version (900Kb) and the second is the one with full resolution graphics (14Mb)

Free: The Digital Urban Booklet

We are pleased to announce the free availability of our booklet: Digital Geography - Geographic Visualisation for Urban Environments. Previously available for £9.99 and printed in full colour the 10 x 8 inch booklet runs to 64 pages of insights and tutorials on Virtual Earth, Google Earth, Google Maps, Panoramas and Second Life.

With a focus on Neogeography, Web 2.0 and the various emerging techniques for urban visualisation the booklet has been written as a preview to the forthcoming Digital Urban 'recipe book.

We have made the booklet available via Issuu - you can read it below:









We hope you enjoy the booklet, it works well in full screen mode. You can also download it direct as a pdf file (74Mb).

You can read the rest of our publications via our main publications thread.

GIS and Augmented Reality in 2015

The last 12 months has seen a turning point in terms of bringing geographically aware augmented reality to mobile devices. Significant developments in locational technology such as the inclusion of a built-in digital compass, GPS (Global Positioning System) and accelerometers into mobile phones have allowed not only location but also heading, and pitch to be detected and therefore incorporated into data display systems. These built-in technologies have brought augmented reality to the hands of the masses, and the phones themselves have sparked a market driven boom in fusing augmented reality with location-based services (LBS).Currently applications are in their infancy and mainly focused on specific topics such as ‘show me where the closest x is’. This however represents the tip of the iceberg with the addition of a GIS into the mix there is notable potential for the industry.

The short paper below was written by Sung-Hyun Jang of the GIS and AR blog and us here at digital urban as part of a larger wide ranging technical report for the Association of Geographic Information which is coming out soon. You can read the short below via Issuu:





To keep up to date with all things GIS and AR, head over to Sung's GIS and AR blog.

30 Days in ActiveWorlds: Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World.

30 Days in ActiveWorlds was a project aimed at documenting the development of a virtual environment from the beginning to end, the point where a plot of virgin land would develop into a community with a urban layout.

In the days long before Second Life it provided an early look at life, love, architecture and the threats of Armageddon from a terrorist group in a virtual world. It remains one of our favorite pieces of work to date:

If you would like to read the paper offline your can download - 30 Days in ActiveWorlds - Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World (pdf link)

Mapping for the Masses Accessing Web 2.0 Through Crowdsourcing: Download the Paper

Our latest paper written with Andrew Crooks, Michael Batty, and Richard Milton from CASA entitled "Mapping for the Masses Accessing Web 2.0 Through Crowdsourcing" is now available online via Social Science Computer Review. The print version comes out later in the year.

For those interested the abstract is as follows:

"The authors describe how we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data. The authors begin with GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base. The authors then describe MapTube that enables users to archive maps and demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be shared, and to create new maps from the bottom-up using a combination of crowdcasting, crowdsourcing, and traditional broadcasting. The authors conclude by arguing that such tools are helping to define a neogeography that is essentially ‘‘mapping for the masses,’’ while noting that there are many issues of quality, accuracy, copyright, and trust that will influence the impact of these tools on map-based communication."

Keywords: network economies; web-based services; map mashups; crowdsourcing; crowdcasting; online GIS.

The paper can be downloaded from here (pdf link).

New Developments in GIS for Urban Planning: GeoSpatial Today

Ever since computers were first developed in the mid 20th century, planners saw an immediate use for them in not only organizing large quantities of data about the city but also in the analysis of that data, the construction of simulation models of how cities functioned, and in forecasting the future form of cities. All these ideas were put in place in the 1950s and 1960s mainly in North America and there were even moves to automate the city planning process itself by formulating models that could generate idealised plans based on data pertaining to the current situation as well as to the specification of future goals.


This technology began with main frame machines where most techniques were operated offline but with increasing networking of computers and miniaturisation down to minicomputers along with the parallel development of personal computers, much of this activity came online. The convergence of communications and computing which has occurred in the last twenty years with the development of the internet and its graphical interface in the form of the world wide web has moved many of these functions into networked environments. The prospect now exists for all stages of the planning.

Read the full article here (pdf link), scheduled to appear in a future print edition of http://www.geospatialtoday.com

The Neogeography of Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World: Urban Informatics

Marcus Foth in the edited book entitled “Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City” brings together in 29 chapters on recent research and development in the field of urban informatics from around the world. The book covers a plethora of topics including; community engagement, digital cities, digital identities, locative media, mobile and wireless applications, participatory planning, personal privacy, surveillance and sustainability.

It is a rather good book and the publishers have kindly allowed us to make our chapter 'The Neogeography of Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World' available online.

Abstract

Digital cities are moving well beyond their original conceptions as entities representing the way computers and communications are hard wired into the fabric of the city itself or as being embodied in software so the real city might be manipulated in silico for professional purposes.



As cities have become more “computable,” capable of manipulation through their digital content, large areas of social life are migrating to the web, becoming online so-to-speak. Here, we focus on the virtual city in software, presenting our speculations about how such cities are moving beyond the desktop to the point where they are rapidly becoming the desktop itself. But what emerges is a desktop with a difference, a desktop that is part of the web, characterized by a new generation of interactivity between users located at any time in any place. We first outline the state of the art in virtual city building drawing on the concept of mirror worlds and then comment on the emergence of Web 2.0 and the interactivity that it presumes.

We characterize these developments in terms of virtual cities through the virtual world of Second Life, showing how such worlds are moving to the point where serious scientific content and dialogue is characterizing their use often through the metaphor of the city itself.

You can download the full chapter here (pdf link)

Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web 2.0 through Crowdsourcing

Our latest working paper is now available for download - entitled Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web 2.0 through Crowdsourcing.

Abstract

The paper first develops the network paradigm that is currently dominating the way we think about the internet and introduce varieties of social networking that are being fashioned in interactive web environments. This serves to ground our arguments about Web 2.0 technologies. These constitute ways in which users of web-based services can take on the role of producers as well as consumers of information that derive from such services with sharing becoming a dominant mode of adding value to such data.

These developments are growing Web 2.0 from the ground up, enabling users to derive hitherto unknown, hidden and even new patterns and correlations in data that imply various kinds of social networking.

We define crowdsourcing and crowdcasting as essential ways in which large groups of users come together to create data and to add value by sharing. This is highly applicable to new forms of mapping. We begin by noting that maps have become important services on the internet with nonproprietary services such as Google Maps being ways in which users can fashion their own functionality. We review various top-down and bottom-up strategies and then present our own contributions in the form of GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base.

We have extended this into an archive of pointers to maps created by this software, which is called MapTube, and we demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be shared, and to create new maps from the bottom up using a combination of crowdcasting, crowdsourcing and traditional broadcasting.

The paper concludes by arguing that these developments define a neogeography which is essentially ‘mapping for the masses’.

Download the paper as a pdf (1.8Mb)

Those interested may also like to check out our full working paper series, including the recent The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life.

The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life: Working Paper 142

The world of Geographic Information (GI) Science has changed. It has experienced expeditious growth over the last few years leading to fundamental changes to the field. Web 2.0, specifically The Cloud, GeoWeb and Wikitecture are revolutionising the way in which we present, share and analyse geographic data.

In this paper we outline and provide working examples a suite of tools which are detailed below, aimed at developing new applications of GIS and related technologies. GeoVUE is one of seven nodes in the National Centre for e-Social Science whose mission it is to develop web-based technologies for the social and geographical sciences. The Node, based at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London has developed a suite of free software allowing quick and easy visualisation of geographic data in systems such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Crysis and Second Life.


These tools address two issues, firstly that spatial data is still inherently difficult to share and visualise for the non-GIS trained academic or professional and secondly that a geographic data social network has the potential to dramatically open up data sources for both the public and professional geographer.


With our applications of GMap Creator, and MapTube to name but two, we detail ways to intelligently visualise and share spatial data. This paper concludes with detailing usage and outreach as well as an insight into how such tools are already providing a significant impact to the outreach of geographic information.

Such tools open up a cornucopia of possibilities for the world of GI Science, especially for geovisualisation and it is high time to embrace the Neogeographer, the data and perhaps more importantly the services they are creating.

Welcome to the new world of geographic information.

Authored by Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith (Digital Urban) and Dr Andrew Crooks (gisagents.blogspot.com)

You can download the full paper The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life in .pdf format (9.8Mb).

Scaling and Allometry in the Building Geometries of Greater London: Paper in The European Physical Journal B - Condensed Matter and Complex System

We have a new journal paper out entitled: Scaling and Allometry in the Building Geometries of Greater London, published in the The European Physical Journal B - Condensed Matter and Complex Systems.

Publisher Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
ISSN 1434-6028 (Print) 1434-6036 (Online)
Issue Volume 63, Number 3 / June, 2008
Category Topical issue dedicated to ECCS2007 - Dresden
DOI 10.1140/epjb/e2008-00251-5
Pages 303-314
Subject Collection Physics and Astronomy
SpringerLink Date Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Abstract:

Many aggregate distributions of urban activities such as city sizes reveal scaling but hardly any work exists on the properties of spatial distributions within individual cities, notwithstanding considerable knowledge about their fractal structure. We redress this here by examining scaling relationships in a world city using data on the geometric properties of individual buildings.

We first summarise how power laws can be used to approximate the size distributions of buildings, in analogy to city-size distributions which have been widely studied as rank-size and lognormal distributions following Zipf [Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (Addison-Wesley, Cambridge, 1949)] and Gibrat [Les Inégalités Économiques (Librarie du Recueil Sirey, Paris, 1931)]. We then extend this analysis to allometric relationships between buildings in terms of their different geometric size properties.

We present some preliminary analysis of building heights from the Emporis database which suggests very strong scaling in world cities. The data base for Greater London is then introduced from which we extract 3.6 million buildings whose scaling properties we explore.

We examine key allometric relationships between these different properties illustrating how building shape changes according to size, and we extend this analysis to the classification of buildings according to land use types. We conclude with an analysis of two-point correlation functions of building geometries which supports our non-spatial analysis of scaling.

You can download the paper via The European Physical Journal B - Condensed Matter and Complex Systems page.