As Machine Learning becomes more prominent in the military, we are faced with a different take on the old problem of how to collect data relevant to some military mission need. We can now embrace the paradigm of too much data where previously we needed to focus on data reduction because humans can only process a finite amount of information. Commanders, analysts, and intelligence officers are often tasked with understanding the current situation in a mission area to create a common operating picture in order to complete their mission objectives. Data pertaining to missions can often be scraped from multiple domains, including patrol reports, newswire, and RF sensors, image sensors, and various other sensor types in the field. In this paper, we describe a system called the Multi-Domain Integration and Correlation Engine (MD-ICE), which ingests data which ingests data from two domains: textual open source information (newswire and social media)and sensor network information, and processes it using tools from various machine learning research areas. MD-ICE manipulates the resulting data into a machine readable unified format to allow for labelling and inference of inter-domain correlations. The goal of MD-ICE is to utilize these information domains to better understand situational context, where open source information provides semantic context (i.e. what type of event, who is involved, etc...)and the sensor network information provides the fine-grain detail (how many people involved, exact area of the event, etc ...). This understanding of situational context in turn can, with further research, help commanders reach their mission objectives faster through better situational understanding and prediction of future needs.
SUMMARY Considerable effort has been put into creating standardised conceptual models for land records, such as the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM). At the same time, there are a number of initiatives to develop land records systems for uncertain situations where standardised models are unlikely to represent the situation on the ground adequately. These initiatives include the Talking Titler model, the Social Tenure Domain Model, and the Open Source Cadastral and Registry (OSCAR) toolset and its accompanying OSCAR Conceptual Data Model (OCDM). Uncertain situations include complex customary systems, urban informal settlements where tenure practices draw on both western and traditional custom, post-conflict situations where power vacuums allow powerful elites to grab land, and changing administrative situations where institutional structures change as a situation stabilises. If justice and fairness are the principal values which drive the improvement of a land administration system, then there is an argument that the technical design of a land record system should be flexible. It should facilitate the merging of records if the initial design is found to be unsuitable or records may be held by different private institutions and government. It should also allow for the continual specialisation of data classes as a situation stabilises and for methods of reflecting unofficial or informal transactions. However, there is a tension between the two antecedents of what will make users likely to use such a system, ease of use and usefulness. Simple systems are most likely to be easy to use and flexible systems which are most likely useful in a complex situation, but which may not be easy to use. In this paper we examine the three different initiatives and consider methods for addressing specific scenarios in a changing situation.
AbstractRecent advances in Web technologies have opened avenues to create socio-technical platforms that can empower citizens in urban planning processes. The rise of the GeoWeb and the popularity of Web 2.0 collaborative tools can facilitate the development of a new generation of bottom-up Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) platforms that can incorporate user-generated content into Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). New service-based delivery mechanisms can provide architectural flexibility and adaptability, and enable the public to benefit from ubiquitous information access. From an e-participation perspective, Web 2.0 social networking functions support interactive communication among various PPGIS stakeholders, e.g., citizens, planners, and decision makers. The main contribution of this article is to present a reference architecture for e-planning platforms that (1) facilitates effective e-participation by allowing multidirectional map-based communication among various land development stakeholders (e.g., planners, decision makers, citizens, etc.), and (2) enables incorporation of visualization, evaluation, and discussion capabilities to support community planning processes. To achieve this, we developed a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that exploits SDI principles and Web 2.0 technologies. The platform architecture allows heterogeneous data sources, analytical functionality and tools, and presentation frameworks to be plugged into a coherent system to provide a planning and decision support platform. We present two real-world implementations of the proposed architecture that have been developed to support community engagement in the City of Calgary, Canada.Keywords: e-participationPPGISurban planningSOASDIWeb 2.0 AcknowledgementThis work was supported by the Canadian NEPTIS Foundation and GEOIDE (Grant TSII 202).Notes1. 'Local' in the sense of an SDI for a smaller, locally focused user community.2. The UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters was adopted on 25 June 1998 in Aarhus, Denmark: http://www.unece.org/env/pp/welcome.html.3. See http://www.opengeospatial.org.4. According to Fischer and Herrmann (Citation2011), socio-technical platforms consider the interaction between people and technology. Generally speaking, they are composed of (1) computers, networks, and software, and (2) people, procedures, and policies, etc.5. For example, workflow management systems such as Taverna (http://www.taverna.org.uk/) and service orchestration engines such as Apache ODE (http://ode.apache.org/) rely on a SOAP interface and a WSDL description to build complex workflows of services and to execute them, whereas OGC WPS must be wrapped in an additional WSDL layer if it is to be combined seamlessly with W3C workflows such as WS-BPEL (Granell Citation2014). Difficulties can arise with this process as the design of OGC WPS assumes some human intervention, whereas W3C services do not (Schade et al. Citation2012). The outcome is that WPS endpoints may not always translate directly, nor completely, to WSDL execution endpoints.6. Spatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena.7. However, there are several approaches to extend data handling capabilities of W3C services, thus enabling binary data exchange (e.g., transferring images). See Zhang et al. (Citation2007) for a detailed discussion.8. https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet.markercluster/9. http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Plugin_development/10. The WalkScore model is an implementation of walkscore.com's model described in WalkScore (Citation2011). See Steiniger et al. (Citation2013) for a description of the WalkYourPlace, Cycling, Walking, and Transit & Walking models.11. http://overpass-api.de/
This report provides the Department for Transport (DfT) with an in-depth understanding of how the public engage with the issue of road user safety. The research used qualitative methods and brought together the views of a wide range of adult road users. Specifically, a deliberative approach was used to explore the public's insights, perceptions and conceptualisation of road user safety and to go beyond their top of mind responses. A total of 240 participants were recruited in 4 areas across the UK (United Kingdom - Bradford, Glasgow, London, north-west Wales). In total, each area had six groups of ten participants. Group composition was based on a life-stage and attitude to road user risk.
Citizen participation should be an essential part of an urban planning process if the needs of the local population are to be addressed. Citizen participation should also improve acceptance of private construction projects by residents that live in or near such development. A complementary form of citizen participation to public planning meetings is to permit citizen engagement via Web 2.0 technologies, which also has the potential to get citizens involved that are usually difficult to reach. We aim to build a social, i.e. participatory, planning platform that allows technology savvy citizens to inform themselves of future and ongoing development projects and to also discuss them online. In this work we discuss the functional needs and context-of-use constraints of such an e-planning platform. A conceptual model of the technical architecture is outlined and a prototype implementation is presented. This prototype is built on free and open source software components, including a social network, to enable platform adoption in other locations. Finally, we discuss the research needs that are to be addressed if the development of participatory e-planning platforms should advance.
Abstract. We propose that participatory GIS (PGIS) activities including participatory urban planning can be made more efficient and effective if spatial reasoning rules are integrated with PGIS tools to simplify engagement for public contributors. Spatial reasoning is used to describe relationships between spatial entities. These relationships can be evaluated quantitatively or qualitatively using geometrical algorithms, ontological relations, and topological methods. Semantic web services utilize tools and methods that can facilitate spatial reasoning. GeoSPARQL, introduced by OGC, is a spatial reasoning standard used to make declarations about entities (graphical contributions) that take the form of a subject-predicate-object triple or statement. GeoSPARQL uses three basic methods to infer topological relationships between spatial entities, including: OGC's simple feature topology, RCC8, and the DE-9IM model. While these methods are comprehensive in their ability to define topological relationships between spatial entities, they are often inadequate for defining complex relationships that exist in the spatial realm. Particularly relationships between urban entities, such as those between a bus route, the collection of associated bus stops and their overall surroundings as an urban planning pattern. In this paper we investigate common qualitative spatial reasoning methods as a preliminary step to enhancing the capabilities of GeoSPARQL in an online participatory GIS framework in which reasoning is used to validate plans based on standard patterns that can be found in an efficient/effective urban environment.
Recently, sensor webs have been increasingly used to monitor and sense a multitude of observations for various applications, from simple phenomena, such as air pollution measurements, to complex events, for instance perimeter security, or effluent tracking. Therefore, the performance of sensor data delivery mechanisms is becoming more and more important to ensure that services dependent upon sensor web technology perform satisfactorily. In the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) framework, Sensor Observation Service (SOS) is a standard web service interface responsible for requesting, filtering, and retrieving sensor observations. In this paper, we present initial results from a quantitative analysis of SOS servers' performance. To do this, we measured the response time and transferred data volume, the response size, of three SOS servers -- 52North, MapServer, and Deegree -- based on different test scenarios. The results are illustrated and discussed. Our findings can be helpful: (i) to understand how different parameters affect the SOS servers; (ii) to help SOS developers identify areas for improvement of their SOS; and (iii) to help application developers and users make informed decisions about their choice of SOS server.
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