GIScience News: Top Stories

Network of Young Researchers in GISc

The young researcher forum for Geographic Information Science aims to help participants of the GI-Days 2007 and other young researchers in field to stay in contact. The forums can be used to discuss current trends in GIScience, to get in contact with other researchers in the field, and to discuss problems and ideas regarding your ongoing (PhD) projects.

XING Join the 'Network of Young Researchers in GISc' at XING

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Austria-Central Asia Centre for GIScience

GIScience blog mentioned about the launch of "Austria-Central Asia Centre for GIScience". This is a partnership through Eurasia-Pacific Uninet was opened on on May 15, 2008 in Bishkek at the Kyrgyz State University fpr Construction, Transportation and Architecture.

Read more @ GIScience Blog

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Recent publications from University of Maine SIE

University of Maine Spatial Information Science and Engineering has recently published the following publications on their website. The papers are from 13th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH 2008);COSIT '07);Lecture Notes in Computer Science etc.
For abstracts/ full papers, refer to the hyper links
  1. R. Reis, M. Egenhofer, and J. Matos, Conceptual Neighborhoods of Topological Relations between Lines, in: A. Ruas and C.Gold (eds.), The 13th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH 2008), Montpellier, France Springer, June 2008.
  2. Markus Wuersch and Max J. Egenhofer, Perceptual Sketch Interpretation, in: A. Ruas and C.Gold (eds.), The 13th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH 2008), Montpellier, France Springer, June 2008.

IJGIS:Volume 22 Issue 6 2008


Volume 22 Issue 6 2008 of International Journal of Geographical Information Science(IJGIS) is now available online.

The research articles available in the issue are:
  • Spatial optimization as a generative technique for sustainable multiobjective land-use allocation Authors: Arika Ligmann-Zielinska; Richard L. Church; Piotr Jankowski
  • Towards a General Field model and its order in GIS Authors: Y. Liu; M. F. Goodchild; Q. Guo; Y. Tian; L. Wu
  • Least visible path analysis in raster terrain Authors: M. Lu; J. F. Zhang; P. Lv; Z. H. Fan
  • Extensions of GAP-tree and its implementation based on a non-topological data model Authors: Changxiu Cheng; Fangqu Niu; Jun Cai; Yanlu Zhu
  • An analysis of urban spatial structure using comprehensive prominence of irregular areas
    Author: Changping Zhang
  • Spatially modelling pathways of migratory birds for nature reserve site selection
    Authors: J. A. Downs; M. W. Horner
  • Gauss Kruumlger projection for areas of wide longitudinal extent
    Author: Carlos Enriacutequez Turintildeo
  • Researchers use cyberinfrastructure to standardize water data collections

    Like the popular children’s song “There’s a Hole in My Bucket,” in which Liza and Henry try to patch a leaking pail, researchers with the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego are plugging a hole in the data management process by creating a universally accepted cyberinfrastructure to study our most valuable natural resource — water.


    The initiative, called the Hydrologic Information System (HIS), is supported by a 5-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to a team of researchers and software developers from five universities. The HIS project is being developed in close collaboration with the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc., or CUAHSI (Pronounced ‘quasi’), it is a joint effort among more than 100 universities and funded by NSF to advance research in hydrology, or the science of water, its properties, distribution and circulation on and below the earth's surface and in the atmosphere.

    Ilya Zaslavsky, director of SDSC’s Spatial Information Systems Laboratory and a key architect of HIS, points to the flood of data on water quality and quantity that’s collected daily via thousands of sensor stations through a multitude of agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

    “We’re drowning in data, but the problem is that most, if not all, of these databases are incompatible with each other,” said Zaslavsky. “Despite water being such a precious commodity and its conservation being such an important issue these days, researchers still don’t have an accurate assessment of just how much water we have as a nation.”

    Developed by Zaslavsky and a team of researchers from around the country, HIS is currently in the first phases of forming a web-based cyberinfrastructure, or the interrelation of computing power, data services and academic expertise. SDSC is the technical partner in HIS, with the national supercomputer center contributing its expertise in web services, online serving of geospatial data, and development of cyberinfrastructure nodes. SDSC houses comprehensive observations catalogs referencing water data collections, and is also responsible for hosting project data and related services as well as the deployment of HIS applications.

    HIS is designed to serve several functions. It facilitates broad and uniform user access to comprehensive distributed collections of water data from federal, state and local repositories, and lets users publish new observation datasets. HIS also provides a common information model and relational schema for storing hydrologic observations data, water data exchange protocols and web services, and a range of hydrologic controlled vocabularies.

    Additionally, HIS is intended to better enable cross-scale analysis of hydrologic cycles and processes on either a regional or continental scale by linking with a range of climate models and integrating data from neighboring disciplines.

    This summer, HIS researchers will release “Version 1.1” of the HIS server software stack to eleven NSF hydrologic observatory test bed sites, after several months of collecting feedback from users and enhancing the overall system. Late last year, SDSC researchers installed the first version of the HIS server software – including databases, tools for web publishing of observations data, front-end applications and a comprehensive web-based data discovery and retrieval system - on dedicated servers before shipping them to the test bed sites, including one at UC Merced. The other NSF test bed sites are in Florida, Iowa, New York, North Carolina, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

    At the core of the HIS system is WaterOneFlow web services, a set of web services for finding and retrieving hydrologic observations data in WaterML format. Under development by HIS researchers, WaterML is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) specification for exchanging water observations that is now being widely accepted throughout the hydrologic community. WaterOneFlow services provide access to large repositories of hydrologic observations maintained at federal agencies such as the EPA, USDA, USGS and NOAA, as well as numerous academic data collections developed in the course of university projects all over the country.

    The ability to access this catalog and retrieve observations data from distributed repositories made this approach attractive to many developers and analysts. Environmental agencies in several states, including Florida, Texas and Idaho, are already working with the HIS team on incorporating their data repositories into the overall system. These agencies have plans to either install the HIS server software stack on their computers, or work with local universities on jointly managing access to their data collections

    “We have had application interest from Arizona to Australia,” said Zaslavsky, adding that the HIS team at SDSC is offering server deployment and maintenance services to organizations interested in online serving and integration of hydrologic observations, including universities, local governments, community groups, and environmental consultants.

    In addition, the USGS recently agreed to adopt the web services application programming interface developed under the HIS program, while the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) began using CUAHSI’s WaterML specification for its Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS) last year. CUAHSI researchers are also working with the EPA to harmonize WaterML with the EPA’s WQX web services.

    “We are extremely encouraged that the USGS and NCDC have chosen to adopt specifications developed within the HIS project,” said Zaslavsky. “Quite simply, the advancement of water science is directly dependent on the integration of all this data into a single representation as we seek the answers to key questions about our water supply.”

    RFID testbed measures multiple tags at once

    Researchers have designed a system capable of simultaneously measuring hundreds of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and rapidly testing new RFID tag prototypes.

    If several RFID tags are in the vicinity of a reader, the reader usually communicates with the tag transmitting the most powerful signal first and then puts it to ‘‘sleep’’ to prevent it from transmitting repeatedly. Then the reader moves to the next most powerful signal, and so on. This process can be very time-consuming.

    The research, funded by the National Science Foundation and conducted with former graduate student Anil Rohatgi and current graduate student Joshua Griffin, was presented in April at the IEEE International Conference on RFID.

    “This testbed allows us to measure the signal strength of tags hidden behind other tags and to rapidly test unique antenna configurations and multiple antennas without actually constructing new tags for each experiment,” said Gregory Durgin, an assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

    Read the complete article over here

    2008 Boeing Award for Best Paper in Image Analysis and Interpretation Announced by ASPRS

    The American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) Boeing Award Selection Committee recently announced the winners of this year’s Boeing Award for Best Paper in Image Analysis and Interpretation.

    The winners are Xiaoliang Lu, Ronggao Liu, Jiyuan Liu, and Shunlin Liang for “Removal of Noise by Wavelet Method to Generate High Quality Temporal Data of Terrestrial MODIS Products”.

    The paper has been published in the October 2007 issue of the PE&RS Journal of ASPRS and the abstract of it can be found here.

    Presentation of this award will take place in May during the ASPRS 2008 Annual Conference in Portland, Oregon. The award is presented by ASPRS through the ASPRS Foundation, with funding provided by Boeing I&SS Mission Systems. The purpose of the award is to stimulate development and recognize achievement in image interpretation and analysis through special acknowledgment of superior publications in the field. The award consists of a presentation plaque provided by Boeing and cash award of $500.

    Established in 1965 as the Autometric Award, this grant recognizes development and achievement in the field of photographic interpretation through special acknowledgment of superior publications on the various aspects of image analysis and interpretation.

    Wednesday, May 7, 2008

    2nd International Workshop on Mobile Geospatial Augmented Reality

    The 2nd International Workshop on Mobile Geospatial Augmented Reality will be held in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, from the 28-29th of August 2008. It follows the great success of the first edition that took place in Banff, AB, in 2006.

    The second edition will be the opportunity to pursue the discussions and reflections initiated between the geospatial and augmented reality communities. This year, the workshop is organised jointly with the workshop of the GeoEduc3D research project funded by the GEOIDE Network of Centres of Excellence. GeoEduc3D deals with educative mobile games, augmented reality and geospatial technologies. Therefore, the mobile game community will also be targeted by the workshop.

    Topics of interest
    • Geospatial information and geoinformatics
    • Mobile augmented reality
    • Mobile games
    For more details on the event visit: http://regard.crg.ulaval.ca/2008/index.php