A Visual Analytics Web Platform for Detecting High Wind Energy Potential in Urban Environments by Employing OGC Standards

Moving into the third decade of the 21st century, smart cities are becoming a vital concept of advancement of the quality of life. Without any doubt, cities today can generate data of high velocity which can be used in plethora of applications. The wind flow inside a city is an area of several studies which span from pedestrian comfort and natural ventilation to wind energy yield. We propose a Visual Analytics platform based on a server-client web architecture capable of identifying areas with high wind energy potential by employing 3D technologies and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. The assessment of a whole city or sub-regions will be supported by integrating Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) outcomes with historical wind sensor readings. The results, in 3D space, of such analysis could be used by a wide audience, including city planners and citizens, for locating installation points of small-scale horizontal or vertical axis wind turbines in an urban area. A case study in an urban quarter of Stuttgart is used to evaluate the interactiveness of the proposed workflow. The results show an adequate performance, although there is a lot of room for improvement in future work.

Scalability in the Application of Geodesign in Brazil: Expanding the Use of the Brazilian Geodesign Platform to Metropolitan Regions in Transformative-Learning Planning

The Brazilian Geodesign platform was proposed based on extensive experience in Geodesign workshops, aiming to adapt the method to the country’s cultural specificities, with a commitment to support the construction of opinions in planning, in the process of transformative-learning planning. To test the scalability of the method, a study was developed in 13 metropolitan regions of the country, with the involvement of universities, distributed from north to south, in different biomes and urbanization conditions. The same method was proposed for everyone, starting from the same collection of 40 thematic maps to support discussions about alternative futures in land use. Participants used the GISColab platform and went through the same stages of analysis, proposition, and negotiation of ideas. As a result, there was an improvement in the projects developed between the first and the last day of work, with the expansion of compliance with the goals of sustainable development (SDG) and areas for carbon credit. It was possible to observe that, although they used the same framework proposed, each group adapted the method to their local reality, proving the scalability of the process and the necessary flexibility for employment in different realities, ensuring a defensible and reproducible criterion. As recommendations, it would be interesting to apply the same study of multiple simultaneous cases in another country, to analyze the scalability and flexibility to local changes, as it happened in the experiment. This would be entirely possible, as the platform is based on worldwide OGC standards (Open Geospatial Consortium) and would have full interoperability in use.

EXPLORING SCHEMES FOR VISUALIZING URBAN WIND FIELDS BASED ON CFD SIMULATIONS BY EMPLOYING OGC STANDARDS

In this paper various schemes for visualizing geo-spatial data such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) data are explored. The architecture of a new Smart Cities Platform is presented and examples of the visualization capabilities are given. Results show that scalar and vectorial measurands, such as wind pressure and wind directions, may be presented using the same schemes, however, interpretation of the visualization varies between measurands. A hex-grid representation of the highly dense point cloud data yields easier interpretation of the scene as do streamlines for visualizing a path of flow over and around buildings. Results of performance evaluations suggest that the same visualisation scheme (e.g. hex-grid) but different data formats, yields faster loading times when using 3D Tiles rather than GeoJSON and an overall smoother interaction within the application.

VISUAL ANALYTICS WEB PLATFORM FOR DETECTING HIGH WIND ENERGY POTENTIAL IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS BY EMPLOYING OGC STANDARDS

We propose a server-client web architecture identifying areas with high wind energy potential by employing 3D technologies and OGC standards. The assessment of a whole city or sub-regions will be supported by integrating Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with historical wind sensor readings. The results, in 3D space, of such analysis could be used for locating installation points of small-scale vertical axis wind turbines in an urban area.

Using standards to model delayed mode sensor processes

<p>Ocean data are expensive to collect. Data reuse saves time and accelerates the pace of scientific discovery. For data to be re-usable the FAIR principles reassert the need for rich metadata and documentation that meet relevant community standards and provide information about provenance.</p><p>Approaches on sensor observations, are often inadequate at meeting FAIR; prescriptive with a limited set of attributes, while providing little or no provision for really important metadata about sensor observations later in the data lifecycle.</p><p>As part of the EU ENVRIplus project, our work aimed at capturing the delayed mode, data curation process taking place at the National Oceanography Centre’s British Oceanography Data Centre (BODC). Our solution uses Unique URIs, OGC SWE standards and controlled vocabularies, commencing from the submitted originators input and ending by the archived and published dataset. </p><p>The BODC delayed mode process is an example of a physical system that is composed of several components like sensors and other computations processes such as an algorithm to compute salinity or absolute winds. All components are described in sensorML identified by unique URIs and associated with the relevant datastreams, which in turn are exposed on the web via ERDDAP using unique URIs.</p><p>In this paper we intend to share our experience in using OGC standards and ERDDAP to model the above mentioned process and publish the associated datasets in a unified way. The benefits attained, allow greater automation of data transferring, easy access to large volumes of data from a chosen sensor, more precise capturing of data provenance, standardization, and pave the way towards greater FAIRness of the sensor data and metadata, focusing on the delayed mode processing.</p>

Harmonising the OGC Standards for the Built Environment: A CityGML Extension for LandInfra

The relatively new Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard LandInfra documents in its data model land and civil engineering infrastructure features. It has a Geography Markup Language (GML) implementation, OGC InfraGML, which has essentially no software support and is rarely used in practice. In order to share the benefits of LandInfra (and InfraGML) with a wider public, we have created the Infra Application Domain Extension (ADE), a CityGML ADE that allows us to store LandInfra features in CityGML. In this paper, we semantically map LandInfra to CityGML, describe our ADE, and discuss a few used cases where our ADE can be useful for applications for the built environment. We also provide software to automatically convert datasets from InfraGML to CityGML (and our ADE), and vice versa, as well as to validate them, which will help practitioners generate real-world InfraGML datasets.

Design of a Generic Mobile GIS for Professional Users

There are multiple location-based services (LBSs) and mobile GIS available for a wide range of applications. Usually such applications are developed to solve a restricted task within a restricted environment. The focus on a particular task is strong, and therefore, such applications can usually not be used in multiple environments. To overcome this issue, this paper presents a concept of a generic professional mobile GIS with a focus on interoperability. Firstly, common issues of mobile applications are presented, and their impact on the development of mobile GIS is analyzed. Subsequently, a new approach for a generic mobile GIS for professional users is presented. Based on multiple OGC standards, the approach leads to a system that can be used in various applications where the quality of surveyed data and analysis capabilities are improved. To prove the strength of the approach with GeoTechMobile, a prototype is presented and evaluated in a case study.

DETECTION AND EVALUATION OF TOPOLOGICAL CONSISTENCY IN CITYGML DATASETS

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The topological consistency of Boundary-Representation models, meaning here that the incidence graph is homeomorphic with the underlying topology of geographical data, is checked for several CityGML datasets, and a first classification of topological inconsistencies is performed. The analysis is carried out on a spatial database system into which the datasets have been imported. It is found that real-world datasets contain many topologically inconsistent pairs of intersecting polygons. Also data satisfying the ISO/OGC standards can still be topologically inconsistent. In the case when the intersection is a point, topological inconsistency occurs because a vertex lies on a line segment. However, the most frequent topological inconsistencies seem to arise when the intersection of two polygons is a line segment. Consequently, topological queries in present CityGML data cannot rely on the incidence graph only, but must always make costly geometric computations if correct results are to be expected.</p>