Day: April 25, 2011

Regional Carrying Capacity Evaluation and Prediction based on GIS in the Yangtze River Delta, China

/ Matt Artz

International Journal of Geographical Information Science, Volume 25, Issue 2, 2011

Jian-Ping Chen; Min Zeng; Yi-Jun Duan

“A generalized conceptual framework for regional carrying capacity evaluation along with its implementation approaches is introduced in this article, demonstrated by the case study in the Yangtze River Delta region, China. Following the data preprocessing, assimilative capacity, supportive capacity, and loading, the three essential aspects of regional carrying capacity, have been evaluated by principal components analysis and/or ecological footprint method. In terms of the characteristics of the results, sustainability criteria are established and used to determine the developmental states from 1997 to 2005 in the study area. Future states from 2006 to 2015 are predicted by a modified cellular automata model, into which an artificial neural network is incorporated to fit the transition rule. As revealed from the results of evaluation and prediction, the overall developmental states are worsening. For the sake of the sustainable development in this region, more attention should be paid to these results.”

OGC Announces “SWE Common” Standards to Simplify Sensor Web Development

/ Matt Artz

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) membership has voted to approve the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) Common Service Model Interface Standard Version 2.0 and the OGC SWE Common Data Model Encoding Standard Version 2.0 as official OGC standards.

The OGC SWE Common Service Model Interface Standard is applicable to all services that provide or require information from or about sensors. It is designed for use cases in which sensors need to be accessed and managed through service interfaces.

The OGC SWE Common Encoding Standard provides a standard model (and XML implementation of the model) for the representation, nature, structure and encoding of sensor related data. It is used for describing static data (files) as well as dynamically generated datasets (on-the-fly processing), real-time streaming data, and process and web service inputs and outputs.

Both of the SWE Common standards are designed to be used with other existing OGC® Sensor Web Enablement standards such as OGC Sensor Model Language (SensorML) Encoding Standard, Sensor Observation Service (SOS) Interface Standard and Sensor Planning Service (SPS) Interface Standard.

The OGC SWE Common Service Model 2.0 Interface Standard is available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/swes and the OGC SWE Common Data Model Encoding Standard Version 2.0 is available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/swecommon.

[Source: OGC press release]

Cultural Heritage: Aligning Archive Maps and Extracting Footprints for Analysis of Historic Urban Environments

/ Matt Artz

Computers and Graphics, Volume 35 Issue 2, April 2011

S. D. Laycock, P. G. Brown, R. G. Laycock, and A. M. Day

“Archive cartography and archaeologist’s sketches are invaluable resources when analysing a historic town or city. A virtual reconstruction of a city provides the user with the ability to navigate and explore an environment which no longer exists to obtain better insight into its design and purpose. However, the process of reconstructing the city from maps depicting features such as building footprints and roads can be labour intensive. In this paper we present techniques to aid in the semi-automatic extraction of building footprints from digital images of archive maps and sketches. Archive maps often exhibit problems in the form of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in scale which can lead to incorrect reconstructions. By aligning archive maps to accurate modern vector data one may reduce these problems. Furthermore, the efficiency of the footprint extraction methods may be improved by aligning either modern vector data or previously extracted footprints, since common elements can be identified between maps of differing time periods and only the difference between the two needs to be extracted. An evaluation of two alignment approaches is presented: using a linear affine transformation and a set of piecewise linear affine transformations.”

Forest Mapping in Lithuania: The Role of Geograhic Information S’s (Science, Systems and Studies)

/ Matt Artz

Vilnius Seminar on Cartosemiotics, Vilnius, Lithuania, 8–9 April 2011

G.MOZGERIS and M. PALICINAS

“There is quite common opinion in a GIS community that mapping is less important than the geographic analysis and that professional GIS users manipulate the numbers but not the nice pictures. Contrary, the cartographer who needs GIS as a tool for map production does not use it for sophisticated analysis and modelling. And this is quite obvious – the cartographer is not a forester, urban planner or biologist and he or she does not necessarily need GIS for sophisticated and rather specific analysis. The aim of this presentation is to discuss the role of GIS as a set of tools or solutions (i) within the frames of forest inventory and management planning, resulting in forest resource information and detailed management prescriptions for some period (Systems), (ii) some fundamental issues raised by the use of GIS and related technologies, such as spatial analysis, map projections, accuracy issues and scientific representation (Science). And, (iii) both systems and science are impossible without systematic study of the use of geographic information (Studies).”