Organisation terrestris GmbH & Co kg

Topic type		Target Type
Case Studies: Relate your experiences. Development: new developments in products. Collaboration: data collection, data sharing, open standards. Open Source Mobile solution		Manager Technical / Developer

Additional Presenters
Name	Pascal Coulon
Organisation	SCISYS
Email	[e-mail]

ID Number

152

Name	Mar’a Arias de Reyna
Organisation	Geocat bv
Email	[e-mail]

Paper Title	Distributed development environments (like GeoNetwork)
I can give a practical demo	no

Paper Abstract (short)

On a spatially distributed world we need a spatially distributed development environment. How can we do it and not fail trying?

Paper Abstract (long)

In this presentation different aspects related to the FOSS4G development process will be described focussing on GeoNetwork opensource, a metadata catalog that started in 2000. Now in 2013 itÕs still here and with lots of active contributions. Some of the topics being discussed will include: - Principles of Telework - Must have tools, to survive in the wild. * The importance of choosing the right tools (svn vs git, skype vs google,...). - (Successful) Example: How GeoNetwork gets improved. - Distributed work: is it really better than face to face? * The danger of no personal contact vs the danger of closed relationship circles - Most common mistakes (No Pants Day!). - Rebuilding Babel * Transposed working hours The presenters have (tele)worked in several projects related to GeoNetwork and are core contributors to the project. We think this presentation should be at FOSS4G as it is a great opportunity to get inside FOSS4G developments and share the knowledge to improve the development with other people working in other FOSS4G software.

Topic type		Target Type
Case Studies: Relate your experiences. Collaboration: data collection, data sharing, open standards.		Manager Technical / Developer

Additional Presenters
Name	Jose Garc’a
Organisation	Geocat bv
Email	[e-mail]

ID Number

61

Name	Dirk Frigne
Organisation	Geosparc
Email	[e-mail]

Paper Title	Doing business with FOSS
I can give a practical demo	no

Paper Abstract (short)

How to make money with FOSS while keeping your customers happy?

Paper Abstract (long)

How to make money with free and open source software ... that's the question! Often the easy answer is Òby delivering services to the clients using the softwareÓ. A more nuanced answer could be: Òto be open in your bussiness model, to cooperate with other FOSS project communities and to provide a sustainable service offer with quality assurance to the clientsÓ. Dirk Frigne, co-founder of Geosparc and spiritual father of Geomajas will share his experience with open source adepts and business people interested in starting doing business in an open and transparent way.

Topic type		Target Type
Case Studies: Relate your experiences. Business Cases: building the economic case.		People new to open source geospatial Manager End User

ID Number

145

Name	Marco Montanari
Organisation	MMo.IT
Email	[e-mail]

Paper Title	Dreamscapes
I can give a practical demo	yes

Paper Abstract (short)

A practical use of open source geographic tools to create wonderful landscapes and maps for gaming

Paper Abstract (long)

The Player Experience of a Role Playing game is based on may factors: ambient, characters, plot and location. The location is usually defined by a map of an area. Dreamscapes is a platform enabling the gamers to create a complete map of a fictional world using a procedural approach and exposing the map of the planet in a web-usable format always keeping style and lazy generation as a guideline. The process of mapping a fantasy world consists of three steps, which are basically the various mapping levels we have in medieval cartography: a large map of a given area of the world, more or less accurate, with a very ÒaestheticÓ approach; a map of a given city, with its features and main roads well marked, but difficult to interact with. Then the players should interact with a photo-realistic city (with a small set of outskirts) or photo-realistic landmarks, because that is where the players have their adventures in. The process starts from the size of the planet to be created, generating a set of projections enabling the best view of the world. After that, over the planet two sets of random points are created. The first set is the base for the land and sea areas, the second is the base for the resources. From each one a Voronoi Diagram is created and the points from one set within a polygon of the diagram created from the other set define the amount of resources or elevation in the specific areas. A percentage is used to decide which adjacent polygons create the various landblocks. After that a small percentage of the polygons defining land is chosen to be transformed into civilized areas. The process iterates creating sub-areas interconnected by part of the edges of a Delaunay triangulation, creating the roads to and from coast and the various locations of the map. Within the cities created after the third iteration of the process, the points are no longer used for their specific locations, but to create up to three major roads. After that, most roads are chosen parallel or almost parallel to the original ones. The next iterations generate infos about the buildings and plazas in the city. The points are then only the centers of elements that randomly are chosen between houses, religious buildings, services, inns. From this choice the area around the point is occupied using some more or less regular forms. After populating a database with such a great amount of data, the db has two possibilities: either it is given into TileMill, in order to generate a set of tiles to be delivered to the players through a WMS with a possible zoom-level that is way beyond the detail given by the usual real-world maps, or it is given into Cartagen, enabling an enormous amount of interaction for the users. From that point on, the play is completely in the hands of the players.

Topic type		Target Type
Case Studies: Relate your experiences. Development: new developments in products. Hacks and Mashes: novel solutions to our problems.		End User Technical / Developer

ID Number

149

Name	Marco Negretti
Organisation	Politecnico di Milano - Campus Como
Email	[e-mail]

Paper Title	DTM Fusion A SVD solution for interpolation problems
I can give a practical demo	no

Paper Abstract (short)

The HELI-DEM project, funded by the European Regional Development Fund, aims to develop a unique DTM for the alpine area between Italy (Piedmont, Lombardy) and Switzerland (Ticino and Grisons) by georeferencing, validation and integration of all the elevation data available. DTMs can be interpolated with different approaches but can happens that a bad spatial configuration of the "observed" points causes an ill conditioning of the equation system with an unrealistic elevation value. We chose to address to the problem through the implementation of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and a command to perform this approach has been implemented in GRASS.

Paper Abstract (long)

Digital Elevation Models represent one basic tool for many environmental and territorial applications. In recent years, both in Italy and Switzerland, elevation data georeferenced in different reference frames and produced with different technologies, accuracies and resolutions have been acquired. The HELI-DEM (HELvetia-Italy Digital Elevation Model) project, funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), aims to develop a unique DTM for the alpine area between Italy (Piedmont, Lombardy) and Switzerland (Ticino and Grisons Cantons). By validation and integration of all the elevation data available within the area of interest of the project and previously correctly georeferenced in the european ETRF2000 reference frame, a multiresolution and multiaccuracy DTM will be produced. The available DTMs are both with medium and high resolution, with national, regional or local extensions. The final DTM will be created using the official regional DTMs of Piedmont and Lombardy and the national Switzerland DTM with resolutions of 5, 20 and 25 meters respectively; moreover an high resolution LiDAR DTM (1 meter planimetric resolution), produced by the Ministry of Environment, which covers the Lombardy and Piedmont main hydrographic basins, will be used. The final product of the project will be a low resolution DTM (planimetric resolution of 2x10-4 degrees both in latitude and longitude) that must cover the whole project area for a total of about 120 millions of nodes. This DTM is obtained by two consequential steps: the merging of the three regional DTMs and then its correction using the elevation data derived from the high resolution LiDAR information. The present paper deals with the production of the low resolution intermediate DTM, obtained by the merging of the regional low resolution DTMs. To merge the three regional DTMs, a preliminary operation has been the transformation of the DTMs from their original reference frames to ETRF2000 - geographic coordinates. Then the three datasets have been merged into a unique dataset, which is no more gridded and composed by points with variable density according to the original resolution of the DTMs that cover the different areas: for example in the Piedmont area the points are denser than inside the Lombardy or Switzerland ones. The re-grid of the unique dataset on the nodes of the low resolution final grid is necessary. DTMs can be interpolated either by deterministic or by stochastic approaches. In our project a deterministic approach has been chosen: in particular, the interpolation is based on a polynomial bicubic surface. In fact it is known from literature that a bicubic surface can well model the morfology of a terrain that presents significant elevation changes at a very local spatial scale as in the case of the project. To interpolate the dataset in one node of the final grid two different solutions can be used: an exact bicubic interpolation with the sixteen nearest points, or a filtered least square interpolation using all the points that fall inside a window with an assigned dimension around the interpolation node. When an exact interpolation is used it can happens that a bad spatial configuration of the "observed" points around the interpolation node causes an ill conditioning of the equation system, therefore interpolation in these cases produces an unrealistic elevation value. A better result can be mostly obtained by using Least Squares filtered interpolation increasing the number of points. But sometimes this solution is still not sufficient yet: bad configurations can still exist. In the DTMs analysis framework, a solution is the application of the Thyconov regularization, which adds a regularization to all the diagonal elements of the normal matrix of the system. This paper however wants to address the problem through the implementation of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). With this algorithm only the parameters that can be estimated are really estimated through a factorization based on the analysis of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors. This approach has been tested for the areas where the usual bicubic approach does not produce good results. The full work discusses the results obtained using the new approach of SVD applied on DTMs in some study cases inside the HELI-DEM project. A command to perform the SVD approach has been implemented in the free and open source GIS GRASS: this command choice the interpolation method (between SVD and Least Squares) for each cell of input raster, in according to parameters setting by user.

Topic type		Target Type
Case Studies: Relate your experiences. Disaster Response: software, case studies, outcomes.		People new to open source geospatial End User Technical / Developer

Additional Presenters
Name	Ludovico Biagi and Laura Carcano
Organisation	Politecnico di Milano - Campus Como, DICA
Email
Name	Alba Lucchese
Organisation	Politecnico di Milano - Campus Como, DICA
Email

ID Number

276

Name	Riccardo De Filippi
Organisation	Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Email	[e-mail]

Paper Title	ENVIRO: A new WebGIS framework to monitor and plan land use systems dynamics based on climate and weather data.
I can give a practical demo	yes

Paper Abstract (short)

The scope of the ENVIRO platform is to frame Integrated Assesment Models (IAMs) to quantify the environmental risk and the vulnerability of agricultural systems to climate change in Trentino and to study and propose policy options for climate change issues.

Paper Abstract (long)

In the past decades, among all the issues that have emerged in the framework of environmental sciences and their applications, climate change is one of the most interesting, debated and hard to manage. Climate modeling, climate data, and weather forecasts are fields where computer science have a major role in tackling big data volumes and processing time issues. Software, computers and networks allow nowadays to interact with a large amount of scientific data, referenced in time and space, to simulate earth system processes and to explore potential management responses. Focusing on these issues we developed ENVIRO, an innovative WebGIS platform which integrates weather-driven, Ecosystem Modeling (EM) to monitor the effects of climate and study the impacts of climate change on Trentino's major agricultural systems. Researchers and stakeholders can use ENVIRO to map and overlay environmental, agricultural and socio-economic data. The platform is modular and it is designed to support the entire pipeline of implementation, validation of experimental models, based on high resolution climate data. enviDB is a spatial-temporal database which addresses the main objective of the system: harmonize and give access to series of maps of weather-climate data, climate change scenarios and land use geodata. The engine of the system is enviModel, a web geoprocessing library of environmental models usable to simulate and map the influences of weather and climate on plant-pathology systems. enviGrid is a built in panel to easy the access and navigation through spatial-temporal climate databases at different aggregation scales in time and space. A web mapping interface, enviMapper, to monitor influences of climate and the vulnerability of agricultural systems to climate change complete the system. All modules and technical components are Open Source and they are built on software endorsed by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). The implementation follows the international Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards for geodata transmission and geoprocesses to enable a complete interoperability with existing spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). Researchers can add new models, as well as simulate life cycles of plants and pathogens and their interaction using the implemented models based on climate data via web geoprocessing technologies. The platform has a typical client server architecture: PostgreSQL with its extension for spatial objects PostGIS is the spatial database of the application server, GeoServer as web mapping server to publish and give access to geospatial data, 52north and pyWPS as web processing services (WPS) for scientific geospatial computing, PL/R to automate the creation of graphs and statistical reports. The web client interface was implemented using Open Layers and ExtJS besides novel techniques coming from HTML5 technologies that enable dynamic client side graph generation and data visualization on the fly. ENVIRO represent a state of the art prototype for applied climate studies with a focus on modeling effects on agriculture at high resolution, in space and time. The platform is designed for two groups of users: environmental scientists, who use weather driven experiments to predict how the plants and pathogens systems react to climate changes, and policy makers, who are interested in simulating and mapping change of policies onto two main agricultural products for Trentino as grapevine and apple. In this first prototyping phase the focus was on Trentino province and the two main crops for the research area. ENVIRO is anyhow a scalable tool and could be extended to the Alpine region or to other research contexts and applications as, e.g., hydrology, forestry, ecology, entomology etc. The system was developed within the ENVIROCHANGE project funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento. Co-Authors: Shamar Droghetti, Calogero Zarbo, Matteo Poletti, Claudia Dolci, Monica Rinaldi1, Emanuele Eccel1, Amelia Caffarra1, Ilaria Pertot1, Cesare Furlanello 1Fondazione Edmund Mach, via Mach 1, S.Michele all'Adige, 38010, TN, Italy