George Petrie (1790–1866) as a collector of Irish song

This chapter considers the contribution of George Petrie as a collector and publisher of Irish song. His upbringing, his professional career first as an artist and subsequently as an archaeologist, and his role as a leading figure in the Royal Irish Academy, all provided important contexts for his collection of traditional song. As the head of the orthographical and etymological section for the Memoir of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland he worked closely with two of the most important Irish scholars of the time, Eugene O’Curry and John O’Donovan, and their influence proved invaluable when he was made president of the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Music of Ireland in 1851. The various sources of the songs he collected and his approach to their notation are considered, as are the characteristics of the contents of the only completed publication of the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Music of Ireland, The Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland in 1855.

George Victor Du Noyer’s large format paintings: Nineteenth-century lecture slides

ABSTRACT The National Museum of Ireland’s natural history collections include a range of large format artworks, many of paleontological subjects, which were painted by George Victor Du Noyer, the celebrated nineteenth-century geologist, antiquarian, and artist who worked for both the Ordnance Survey of Ireland and the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI). Letterbook references in the archives of GSI indicate that most, if not all of these, were commissioned by Joseph Beete Jukes, director of the GSI, for different public lecture series. The artistic qualities of the work suggest they were done at speed. However, they also are designed to be seen from a distance within a lecture hall, so an apparently crude technique is appropriate to the purpose. In effect, the watercolor paintings in this series are the PowerPoint presentation of the 1850s.

Functional approach to the search for quasi-optimal value of regularization parameter in downward continuation of potential field

The Tikhonov regularized approach to the downward continuation of potential fields is a partial but strong answer to the instability and ambiguity of the inverse problem solution in studies of applied gravimetry and magnetometry. The task is described with two functionals, which incorporate the properties of the desired solution, and it is solved as a minimization problem in the Fourier domain. The result is a filter in which the high-pass component is damped by a stabilizing condition, which is controlled by a regularization parameter (RP) — this parameter setting is the crucial step in the regularization approach. The ability of using the values of the functionals themselves as the tool for RP setting in the comparison with commonly used tools such as various types of LP norms is demonstrated, as well as their possible role in the source’s upper boundary estimation. The presented method is tested in a complex synthetic data test and is then applied to real detailed magnetic data from an unexploded ordnance survey and regional gravity data as well to verify its usability.

Maps of a Nation? The Digitized Ordnance Survey for New Historical Research

Although the Ordnance Survey has itself been the subject of historical research, scholars have not systematically used its maps as primary sources of information. This is partly for disciplinary reasons and partly for the technical reason that high-quality maps have not until recently been available digitally, geo-referenced, and in color. A final, and crucial, addition has been the creation of item-level metadata which allows map collections to become corpora which can for the first time be interrogated en masse as source material. By applying new Computer Vision methods leveraging machine learning, we outline a research pipeline for working with thousands (rather than a handful) of maps at once, which enables new forms of historical inquiry based on spatial analysis. Our ‘patchwork method’ draws on the longstanding desire to adopt an overall or ‘complete’ view of a territory, and in so doing highlights certain parallels between the situation faced by today’s users of digitized maps, and a similar inflexion point faced by their predecessors in the nineteenth century, as the project to map the nation approached a form of completion.

Nowhere to Play: Available Open and Green Space in Greater London Schools

Experiencing outdoor space, especially natural space, during childhood and adolescence has beneficial physical and mental health effects, including improved cognitive and motor skills and a lower risk of obesity. Since school-age children typically spend 35–40 hours per week at schools, we quantified their access to open (non-built-up) space and green space at schools in Greater London. We linked land use information from the UK Ordnance Survey with school characteristics from the Department for Education (DfE) for schools in Greater London. We estimated open space by isolating land and water features within school boundaries and, as a subset of open space, green space defined as open space covered by vegetation. We examined the relationship of both school open and green space with distance to Central London, whether the school was fee-paying, and the percentage of pupils eligible for free school meals (as a school-level indicator of socioeconomic status). Almost 400,000 pupils (30% of all pupils in London) attended schools with less than ten square metre per pupil of open space—the minimum recommended area by DfE—and 800,000 pupils attended schools with less than ten square metre per pupil of green space. Of the latter, 70% did not have any public parks in the immediate vicinity of their schools. School green space increased with distance from Central London. There was a weak association between the school-level socioeconomic indicator and the amount of open and green space. Fee-paying schools provided less open space compared to non-fee-paying schools in central parts of London, but the provision became comparable in suburban London. Many London schools do not provide enough open and green space. There is a need to ensure regular contact with green space through safeguarding school grounds from sales, financially supporting disadvantaged schools to increase their outdoor space and providing access to off-site facilities such as sharing outdoor space with other schools.

3RD BIM/GIS INTEGRATION WORKSHOP AND 15TH 3DGEOINFO CONFERENCE 2020 – PREFACE

The interest in and use of 3D models in built environments is rapidly increasing, and they are now a key component of decision-making in areas including climate change mitigation (e.g., calculating solar panel potential, flood modelling, modelling housing age for retrofitting of thermal insulation), urban planning and cadastral systems (modelling rights, restrictions and responsibilities in complex buildings, streamlining the process to issue planning permits, design of existing or new developments) and infrastructure (construction, transport, utility management and modelling, asset management). 3D models are also an integrator for the data underpinning smart cities – knowing where a sensor is in 3D space allows the data to be integrated with the surrounding context – for example, noise data could be integrated with traffic information. Reflecting this interest, national mapping and cadastral agencies (NMCA) including Ordnance Survey (GB) are now increasingly generating 3D mapping at national scale, and there is extensive research as to how this data can be integrated with another emerging source of 3D models such as building information modelling (BIM).These trends were evident during the 3rd BIM/GIS Integration Workshop and 15th 3DGeoInfo 2020 events, which were co-hosted by University College London and Ordnance Survey (GB) in September 2020. The workshop and conference brought together international researchers from academia, industry, government and national mapping and cadastral agencies in the field of 3D geoinformation, in an interdisciplinary gathering of researchers in the fields of data collection, data management, data quality, data analysis, advanced modelling approaches, applications, users, visualisation, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and many more.This year’s theme was Users and Use Cases. The workshop and conference covered a wide range of topics including 3D data acquisition and processing, 3D city modelling and related standards, visualisation and dissemination of 3D data, augmented and virtual reality, 3D and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. Three sessions of the BIM/GIS Integration Workshop were dedicated to Applications of BIM/GIS Integration, and an entire day of 3DGeoInfo 2020 to Users and Use Cases within 3DGeoInfo. Additionally, two sessions were specifically aimed at NMCA participants.Although initially intended to be a face-to-face event in London, the team rapidly adjusted to the emerging COVID-19 situation, identifying an online solution that facilitated and encouraged participant interaction. This meant that the events could still provide a platform for learning, discussion, and exchange of ideas that they have been able to in previous years, as well as providing opportunities to promote international collaboration in these topics. This special issue of the ISPRS International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences contains 23 papers selected by a double-blind peer review involving a minimum of two reviewers, presenting research on topics including visualisation, point cloud management, virtual reality, data interoperability, data quality, generating national 3D datasets, indoor 3D, urban planning/permits and underground data management.