The document discusses research areas and projects at the Nottingham Geospatial Institute including spatial data infrastructures, geospatial analysis, openness and interoperability, location-based services, geosemantics, geoinformatics, 3D GIS, crowdsourcing, planetary, and agricultural applications. It provides examples of PhD projects on topics such as crowd-sourcing 3D building interiors, engaging communities for mapping water supplies, and identifying geological features on Mars using crowd-sourcing. Current activities and projects are also listed relating to areas of crowdsourcing, pervasive computing, semantics, spatial interfaces, 3D modeling, open source software and data, and sensor web technologies.

1. Geospatial Science
Nottingham Geospatial Institute
Jeremy Morley
Theme Leader
jeremy.morley@nottingham.ac.uk

2. NGI: Geospatial Science
 Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI)
 Geospatial Analysis and Analytics
 Openness and Interoperability
 Location Based Services (LBS)
 Geosemantics, Language and Cognition
 Geoinformatics and Data Modelling
 3D GIS
 Crowd-sourcing & Geosp. Data Quality
 Planetary
 AgriGIS

3. ottingham
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Xuelin He
Example PhD projects
– Exchangeable geoweb services & push services
Emily Webber
– Strategies in navigational device use and their effects on
environmental learning
Julian Rosser
– Crowd-sourcing of 3D building interiors
Mark Iliffe
– Engaging communities in the developing world for
mapping and improvements to water supplies
Abdur Rahman
– Attitudes to sharing using check-ins and geotags
James Sprinks
– How far can crowd-sourcing be pushed for identifying
geological features of Mars?

4. Current Activities
 OGC: Board + Technical Committee; IndoorGML ViceChair
 EuroSDR: UK National Academic Rep., Chair Commission V
 AGILE: Chair
 GEOSS Science and Technology Committee (STC).
 Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO): GI Board
 UK Location Progrm. (Interoperability Board,) User Group
 Oracle Spatial Centre of Excellence: 1 of 3 globally
 UK-Environmental Observation Framework Data Advisory
Group (UK-EOF DAG)
 FOSS4G 2013: Conference hosts, co-chair, team members
 ICA: Chair, Commission on Open Source Geospatial Tech.
 AGILE/EuroSDR/OGC:
Persistent Interoperability Test-bed initiators

5. OPEN SOURCE GIS
GEOWEB
(Mashups, Web 2.0, OSM)
SDI / TRADITIONAL GIS
OGC / ISO –
STANDARDISATION
POLES APART?
UK OPEN DATA
(Linked data)

7. Mathare
Mark Iliffe,
Horizon DTC Phd student
(c) OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA

8. Taarifa.org
Introducing #Taarifa

9. Problem
•52% of Water points in Tanzania are non-functional.
•30% population coverage.
1 toilet to 93 people in the Tandale slum
•Build new infrastructure as well as maintaining and
fixing broken infrastructure.
•Support existing water users, suppliers and
maintainers.
“The problem we are trying to solve is that
the technology we design is difficult for our
users to use and access.” Steven Feldman

12. Task 2.5:Natural Language Discovery and
Query Interface
• motivation: intuitive natural language query
query using Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) – restricted natural language
• aim: discovery of geographic resources
using natural language based on the user’s perspective, without specialist knowledge
• means: multilingual natural language web application
web front end and WPS to process users’ queries
Kristin Stock, Claudia Cialone, Ronald Ranjit, Amir Pourabdollah

13. How does it work?
• User interface:
– allows user input combining:
• natural language using Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)
to describe the spatial query and
• ontology concepts for geographic features,
– is supported by an OWL ontology.
– formulates WPS request.
• WPS:
– gets resources that are semantically related to the selected ontology concepts
– converts NSM user request to Prolog
– runs request against a prolog knowledgebase to identify which spatial relation it
describes
– performs spatial query on semantically related resources
– ranks resources and returns them to user interface
• User interface displays resources

15. INDOOR / OUTDOOR

16. City modelling technology
 Photogrammetry
 Laser scanning (LiDAR)
 Structure-from-motion (Photosynth)
 CAD / construction models
 Building modelling tools (Sketchup)
 Architectural design tools
 Streetview? Panoramas? Video walkthru?
 Games environments

17. Taken from OGC CityGML 1.0 standard

18. http://www.iai-tech.
org/ifc/IFC2x3/T
C1/html/index.htm

19. Crowdsourcing building
interior models
Julian Rosser
 Interior data important for many areas
– Not often available
– Not easy to capture or maintain
 Public and private spaces require modelling
– User control of data
– Users understand accessibility
 Can building models be crowdsourced?
– Dynamic (frequent) resurvey
– Resident-generated GIS (Talen, 1999).
 Need geometry, semantics, texture,
landmarks
http://www-video.eecs.berkeley.edu/research/indoor/
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwh/buildingmaker.html

20. Research questions
Julian Rosser
 How can volunteered data be best elicited from users in order to
model 3D building interiors?
– Can mobile devices provide a platform for capture and update
of building interior data?
 Simple & accessible
– How can 3D GIS store and validate (topologically correct)
building interiors?
 Disparate, incomplete, optimal models
 CityGML vs BIM vs ?
– What is the role of volunteered building models in aiding
emergency management and disaster response?
 Need public & private models
 Supplement / validate remotely sensed data

21. Indoor / Outdoor integration
 Still, many indoor solutions are separate
from the city model
 How do we manage possible quite
inaccurate indoor models in the outside
building shell?
 How do we connect path & space from
outdoors in?

22. IndoorGML (OGC)

24. Crowd-sourcing vernacular
geography
Julian Rosser,
Jeremy Morley
Rate-My-Place Facebook app
Fuzzy zones (vs Flickr alpha shape)

25. Finding pauses in verbal route descriptions, by males & females
m
Tokunbo Olorundami, Jeremy Morley, Svenja Adolphs

26. NGI: Geospatial Science
 Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI)
 Geospatial Analysis and Analytics
 Openness and Interoperability
 Location Based Services (LBS)
 Geosemantics, Language and Cognition
 Geoinformatics and Data Modelling
 3D GIS
 UGSC / VGI / Geospatial Data Quality
 Planetary
 AgriGIS

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Current & recent projects
• JISC – ELOGeo & follow-on
• 1Spatial – OSM-GB
• FP7 – THE ISSUE
• MoD/DSTL – AGIS
• GEM – IDCT
• BBSRC – GRASP (to recruit)
• FP7 – PRoVIDE (starting Jan 2013 – recruiting ~March ‘13)
• FP7 – COBWEB (Citizen Observatory Web)
• OS – Future Data
• FP7 – PRoVisG
• FP7 – EuroGEOSS
• FP7 – e-SOTER
• Transport iNet – ECO-TRAX
• EPSRC – TPM
• TSB - SWIMA

29. • Crowd sourcing / VGI
• Pervasive computing
• Semantics & linguistic analysis
• Spatial data HCI, visualisation, presentation
technologies
• 3D city & building modelling: indoor & out
• Open source geo software & open geo data
• Geospatial databases, search + data mining
• Positioning and tracking technologies
• Sensor-web technologies