The lead section of the September 2016 issue focuses on the Special Feature – The Power of Location and contains a selection of key papers from the Research@Locate15 Conference held in Brisbane. In addition, this issue contains a range of papers from across the spatial science disciplines including remote sensing and image analysis, GNSS, spatial data infrastructures and online animated maps.
The Guest Editors for the Special Feature, Bert Veenendaal (Curtin University) and Allison Kealy (University of Melbourne), bring together the threads of papers from the Research@Locate15 Conference. Li Liu and Samsung Lim present a new framework for road extraction from airborne lidar data and aerial imagery. Xuefen Liu and Samsung Lim focus on evacuation management in emergency situations and propose a shelter assignment and routing strategy for evacuating households in an event such as the 2011 Brisbane flood event in Australia. Qian Sun, Cecilia Xia, Nandakumaran Nadarajah, Torbjörn Falkmer, Jonathan Foster and Lee Hoa present research that describes a conceptual framework and an integrated GIS-based visual-motor coordination model to investigate drivers’ behaviour via a combination of vision tracking and vehicle positioning. The purpose of the study is to provide data to integrate information related to driver psychology, vehicle dynamics and road information in order to tackle research questions concerning driving safety. Sam Amirebrahimi, Abbas Rajabifard, Priyan Menids and Ngo Tuan present findings designed to facilitate integration of BIM and GIS data to allow detailed assessment and 3D visualization of flood damage to buildings in emergency situations, thus overcoming the barriers caused by data held in disparate systems. Further background is provided in the Preface presented by Veenendaal and Kealy.
Qingseng Liu, Gaohuan Liu, Chong Huang, Chuanjie Xie, Lin Chu and Lei Shi considered the question whether the tasselled cap transformation (TCT) components from each unique tasselled-cap-like feature space from different sensors are directly comparable. Their study compared the differences of the TCT components from Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and Landsat 7 Enhanced TM Plus (ETM+) images with different TCT coefficients from paired images.
Christian Neuwirth, Barbara Hofer and Andreas Schaumberger identified the limitations of spatial system dynamics models that are typically implemented by linking stock variables to raster grids while the use of object representations of human artefacts such as buildings or ownership is limited. The authors address this limitation and demonstrate the use of object representations in spatial systems dynamics.
Xiaojiang Li, Weidong Li, Qingyan Meng, Chuanrong Zhang, Tamas Jancso and Kangli Wu recognize that urban vegetation is important for the well-being of urban residents; however, few urban greenery mapping studies have taken the vertical dimension into consideration in evaluating human interactions with nearby greenery. In this study, a new index evaluates human proximity to greenery for each building block in urban areas, which further can help planners to find critical areas for urban greening programmes.
Slum detection from satellite imagery has always been challenging due to the variability in slum types and definitions. The research of Divyani Kohli, Richard Sliuzas and Alfred Stein aims to develop a method for slum detection based on the morphology of the built environment using segmentation, hierarchical classification using object-oriented image analysis and integrating expert knowledge in the form of a local slum ontology.
Sorin Nistor and Aurelian Buda investigated GPS network noise analysis using data gathered during a period of 18 months. For noise determination they used a first-order Gauss-Markov model and to examine the behaviour of the chosen noise model, the power spectra density of the residuals and the log likelihood values were used. The results were compared with those from the power law plus white noise model.
Deniztan Ulutaş, Gülten Kara and Gülten Cömert from Turkey are looking to the future regarding technological infrastructure for SDIs. Their view is the current technologies of the syntactic web will be replaced in the near future by semantic web technologies to take advantage of available interoperability infrastructures.
The final paper by Pawel Cybulski focuses on the classification of online animated maps to determine whether animated maps that are published on the internet are designed with guidelines that are aligned with cartographic principles. The results of this research indicate the evolution of animated maps which is taking place is not causing erosion of the cartographic rules, but they are adapting to new technological and user circumstances.
Curtin University