Digital Earth, Geospatial Web, Internet of Places, Citizen Science, Participatory Sensing

1. GEO Laboratory
Como Campus
From Digital Earth to the Internet of Places
for management of risks and emergencies
Maria Antonia Brovelli, Marco Minghini, Monia Molinari,
Carolina Arias Munoz, Marco Negretti, Giorgio Zamboni,
Politecnico di Milano, DICA – GEO Laboratory at Como Campus

2. 2 Overview
✔ Cartography and Geoinformatics today
✔ Digital Earth
✔ Internet of Places
✔ Geospatial Web
✔ Geospatial Web 2.0
✔ Examples reusedable in case of risks and
emergencies management
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

3. 3 The Digital Earth/ 1
The vision of Digital Earth (DE) was proposed by Al Gore in 1998 as
a multi-dimensional and multi-resolution model of the planet to
contextualize the huge amount of geo-referenced information
relating to the physic and social-economic environment.
Every day we create 1018 bytes of data and the 80% are geo-referenced
or geo-referenceable data. It is an amazing amount of
data that corresponds every day to a stack of DVDs covering the
earth-moon distance. Fixed and mobile in-situ sensors (on satellite,
aircraft, UAVs, ...), digital documents, social media contribute to
create the Big Data in real time, we need to extract the useful piece of
information from in real time to meet today's challenges. The issue
was the acquisition of the data in the past. Now it is the smart
management to extract useful information.
Gore, A., 1998 The Digital Earth: underdstanding our planet in the 21st century,
http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=6210
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

4. 4
The Digital Earth/ 2
• The Digital Earth is a set of distributed, multi-thematic, multi-resolution
and multi-perspective archives of geo-referenced
knowledge that
 allows to navigate not only through space but also through time,
thanks to the access to historical data as well as to the future
predictions based on the environmental and/or social-economic
models;
 responds to the needs of different stakeholders: Scientists,
Decision Makers, Communities, Citizens, Children ...
• The Digital Earth is based on the open access and participation
(Geoweb2.0, Science2.0, ...) through multi-platforms.
• According to this paradigm, it will be possible - through both current
devices (computer, tablet, smartphone) and new devices (not
invented yet) – to access data, information, services, models,
scenarios and forecasts: from simple applications to complex
analysis related to the environmental and socio-economic issues.
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

5. 5 The Internet of Places
Objects (or things) will be connected and communicate
through the network (we expect to have 26 billion devices
connected within 2020) and, according to their location and
time, they will react in different ways. The space-time field
will model the Internet of Places, together with the Internet
of People, the Internet of Information and the Internet of
Things.
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

6. 6 The Internet of Everything
… The Internet of Things is becoming the Internet of Everything.
Although much of the hype has been around things becoming part of
the Internet, the additive power of the Internet comes into play when
things, people, places and systems work together. …
This describes a concept Gartner calls the "Internet of Everything."
The Internet of Things is just one piece of this concept — alongside
the Internet of People (such as social networks or IM presence), the
Internet of Places (such as Foursquare or any location that can
broadcast information about itself), and the Internet of Information (for
example, the World Wide Web, or systems that can share information
through APIs or Web services)..
Kristian Steenstrup (Vice President and Gartner Fellow in Gartner's
Office of the CIO Research team)
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

7. 7 Geospatial Web
data
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

8. 8 Geospatial Web
users
data
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

9. 9 Geospatial Web
users
data
catalogues
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

10. 10 Geospatial Web
users
data
processing
catalogues
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

11. 11 Geospatial Web
INTERNET
users
catalogues
data
processing
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

12. 12 Spatial GeoData Infrastructure
Discover
Access Data
Storage Use
Publish
Interoperability!!
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

13. 13 Our experience
SERVER CLIENT
WPS
WMS
DATA WEB PUBLICATION
DATA STORAGE
DATA WEB VISUALIZATION
DATA MOBILE VISUALIZATION
SOS
WFS
WCS
ZOO Knowledge partner
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

14. 14
GeoWeb 2.0
✔ Evolution of the 1990s GeoWeb 1.0
✔ Interactive tools allowing user participation in spatial data management
✔ OGC standards for geospatial interoperability
✔ GPS, AJAX and mapping Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
✔ Neogeography (Turner 2006)
➔ creation of maps through mash-ups of multiple data sources
✔ Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) (Goodchild 2007)
➔ the idea of humans acting as sensors able to acquire spatial contents
✔ Crowdsourcing (Howe 2006)
➔ the act of a mass of users to share a job through an open call
✔ Diffusion of mobile devices equipped with sensors (GPS, camera, etc.)
➔ users can easily perform real-time collection of georeferenced data
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

15. 15
Citizen science – Our experience
✔ Set of practices in which citizens participate in data collection, analysis
and dissemination of a scientific project (Cohn 2008)
✔ Active or passive
✔ Explicit or implicit
✔ Classification (Haklay 2013)
➔ 'classic' citizen science: amateurs engaged in traditional scientific activities
➔ community science: measurements and analysis carried out by amateurs in
order to set action plans to deal with environmental problems
➔ citizen cyberscience: use of computers, GPS receivers and mobile phones
✗ volunteered computing: citizens download data, run analyses on their own
computers and send back data to the server
✗ volunteered thinking: citizens perform classification works
✗ participatory sensing: applications centered on mobile phones capabilities
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

16. 16
Our experience
✔ To build an architecture for participatory sensing applications enabling:
➔ field-data collection from mobile devices
➔ data access and interaction based on user privileges
➔ data Web publication and sharing
➔ data access through multi-dimensional (2D and 3D) Web interfaces
➔ data participative enrichment
✔ To use FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
➔ Involvement in OSGeo (Open Source For Geospatial)
➔ Involvement in GeoForAll
ICA-OSGeo-ISPRS initiative http://www.geoforall.org/
89 Labs as of 20 September 2014
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

17. 17
Our experience
✔ To be involved in WG IV/5 of ISPRS Web and Cloud Based Geospatial
Services and Applications
✔ To be involved in two COST Actions
➔ Information and Communication Technologies COST Action TD1202 Mapping
and the Citizen Sensor
➔ Information and Communication Technologies COST Action IC1203 European
Network Exploring Research into Geospatial Information Crowdsourcing:
software and methodologies for harnessing geographic information from the
crowd (ENERGIC)
✔ To be proudly involved in the development of the NASA Worldwind
Virtual Globe
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

18. 18 Participatory sensing FOSS architecture
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

19. 19 Report of potholes
✔ Report of road pavement damages, winter 2012-13 (Brovelli et al. 2014a)
➔ classification of the type of damage and its severity degree
➔ open to everyone, advertised through local media (TV and newspapers)
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

20. 20 Report of potholes
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

21. 21 Report of potholes
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

22. 22 Report of architectural barriers
✔ Report of architectural barriers, fall 2013
➔ obstacles for physically impaired people (stairs, ramps, pathways)
➔ verification of the compliance with the current Italian legislation
➔ performed by students within a collaboration action with a local high school
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

23. 23 Report of architectural barriers
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

24. 24 Mapping street furniture
✔ Report of street furniture elements, spring 2014
➔ benches, litter bins, waste bells, fountains
➔ performed by students within a collaboration action with a local high school
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

25. 25 AdbPo report of water-related elements
✔ Report of water-related elements, ongoing (Brovelli et al. 2014b)
➔ VGI campaign managed by AdbPo (Autorità di Bacino del fiume Po – Po river
basin Authority) to enlarge consciousness of its territory through collection and
valorisation of user local knowledge and experience
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

26. 26 Mapping elements along cultural paths
✔ Map parties within INTERREG project “The paths of Via Regina”, ongoing
➔ user report of points of interest related to history, culture, tourism and other
services along the paths connected to the ancient Via Regina
➔ one-day events (jointly organized with a cultural association of hikers) which
target local communities and are advertised ad hoc
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

27. 27 Mapping elements along cultural paths
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

28. 28 PoliCrowd – A social World Wind platform
✔ Web-based 3D participatory platform, ongoing (Brovelli et al. 2013)
➔ Born for tourism, culture, sports & transportation Points Of Interest (POIs)
➔ POIs 3D visualization on NASA World Wind virtual globe
➔ participative functionalities: POIs collaborative enrichment & project creation
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

29. 29 PoliCrowd2.0 – A social World Wind platform
✔ Web-based 3D participatory platform, ongoing (Brovelli et al. 2013)
➔ non mono-thematic application – connection to any WMS and ODK server
➔ customizable data styling & multimedia support
➔ support for time dimension (4D visualization)
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

30. 30 PoliCrowd and Policrowd2.0
✔ Web-based 3D participatory platform, ongoing (Brovelli et al. 2013)
➔ partially developed by PoliMi students (Giorgio Zamboni tutor)
➔ winner of the 1st and the 2nd NASA World Wind Europa Challenge
http://geomobile.como.polimi.it/policrowd2.0
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

31. 31 Contacts
Thanks for your attention!
Maria Antonia Brovelli
Politecnico di Milano
Laboratorio di Geomatica – Polo Territoriale di Como
Via Valleggio 11, 22100 Como (Italy)
maria.brovelli@polimi.it
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus

32. 32 Announcement
✔ FOSS4G Eu 2015 (Free and Open Source For
Geospatial Europe 2015) will be held in Como –
Politecnico di Milano:
– 14 July 2015: Workshops
– 15-16-17 July 2015: Conference
– 16 July 2015 – evening: Mapping Party organized
with ICA in the frame of the International Map Year
http://internationalmapyear.org/
– 18 July 2015: Sprint Code
GEO Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus