A 3D WEB BASED GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM

FOR REGIONAL PLANNING

Giuseppe Conti, Michele Andreolli, Stefano Piffer and Raffaele de Amicis

Graphitech, Center for Advanced Computer Graphics Technologies, Via Alla Cascata 56/C, Trento, Italy

Keywords: 3D geobrowser, GeoRSS, planning, INSPIRE directive.

Abstract: Managing a territory through web based Geobrowsers requires very interactive and scalable architectures,

capable to access vast scale repositories and capable to provide real-time behaviour. This paper illustrates a

web-service based infrastructure developed by Graphitech to access geographical information of

environmental interest. The paper shows that a 3D Geobrowser, deployed as a web-start application, is used

to access a variety of different remote repositories containing a wide range of geographical information at a

regional scale. Each user can interactively navigate within the 3D environment and can also interactively

send real-time information on environmental features using GeoRSS technology. The paper illustrates how

the resulting system is currently in use by an urban planning authority during their daily activities.

1 INTRODUCTION

The process of planning and managing a territory

requires a deep understanding of a very large

territory, of its problems, evolution and resources.

Traditionally this process was carried on with the

use of paper-based maps and more recently through

the use of GIS (Geographical Information Systems)

systems.

The availability of Web-based Geographical

Information Systems and more specifically 3D

Geobrowsers such as Google™ Earth (Google,

2007), Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ (Microsoft,

2007) or NASA WorldWind (NASA, 2007) has

extended the domain of GIS-based application to the

web. This has brought to a radical breakthrough in

the daily workflow of planners and administrators.

In fact the use of geobrowsers has made it possible

to use Geobrowser as a new generation of easy to

use yet powerful planning tools as they give

operators the possibility to interactively access vast

amount of territorial data in a very interactive and

effective manner.

3D Geobrowsers are today used by a number of

administrations both as a working tool (Tang, 2003)

and as a platform to make geographical data publicly

available to the entire community (PAB, 2007).

The nature of data accessed by Geobrowsers is

traditionally static as in most cases Geobrowsers

render only static information such as orthophoto,

vector data (e.g. streets and houses), as well as 3D

objects, (e.g. buildings and trees), which are

extracted from a database. However access to real-

time data can be of crucial importance in contexts

such as emergency planning and management,

traffic management etc.

The recent availability of GeoRSS has helped

filling this gap by extending the real-time nature of

standard Really Simple Syndication – RSS (RSS

Advisory Board, 2007) feeds to the geographical

context.

This paper shows how the use of GeoRSS has

been implemented within an interactive 3D web-

based Geobrowser to allow users and operators to

distribute information to the wide community of

users. The results of the system are illustrated within

a real life scenario.

2 THE IMPORTANCE OF

REAL-TIME DATA

Access, distribution and processing of real-time

Geographical Information (GI) are basic

preconditions to support the process of

environmental decision-making (De Amicis, 2007).

The heterogeneity of information on the

environment today available is driving a wide

number of initiatives, on both sides of the Atlantic,

155

Conti G., Andreolli M., Piffer S. and de Amicis R. (2008).

A 3D WEB BASED GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR REGIONAL PLANNING.

In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, pages 155-160

DOI: 10.5220/0001520701550160

 SciTePress

which advocate the strategic role of proper

management and processing of real-time or quasi

real-time environment-related data within a

harmonised web-based IT infrastructure designed to

better monitor and manage the environment.

This is proved by several regulatory actions

within the international stage, such as the recent

INSPIRE directive (INfrastructure for SPatial

InfoRmation in Europe), approved by the EU and in

force since 15-05-2007 (JRC, 2007). INSPIRE will

enforce to member states the creation of a highly

interoperable, web-service-based, Spatial Data

Infrastructure (SDI), based on ISO and OGC® -

Open Geospatial Consortium standards (OGC, 2007)

to better support environmental monitoring and

planning.

Other initiatives of relevance within the

European context have been promoted by the EEA

(European Environmental Agency) which plays a

major role promoting sustainable development at the

EU level through the Environmental Action

programs. Most notably EEA contributes to

EIONET - European Environment Information and

Observation Network (EEA, 2007) to support the

collection and organization of environmental spatial

data. Further EEA supports EEIS (European

Environmental Information System) as well as SEIS

(Shared Environmental Information System) to

produce and manage software components which

will contribute to the forthcoming creation of a web-

service based ESDI (European Spatial Data

Infrastructure). The importance of environmental

monitoring is also emphasized by the other major

initiatives such as the Global Monitoring for

Environment and Security (GMES, 2007) which

represents the EU initiative within GEOSS (Global

Earth Observation System of Systems).

3 STATE OF THE ART

Within the scientific community the importance of

interactive with 3D environments for environmental

planning applications has been stressed by different

authors (Bishop, 2005). Access of real time data is

essential to environment and risk management

(Laurini, 2005). To this extent a number of

international initiatives have tried to reach a mature

standardization level for real-time environmental

data. Most notably OGC® has proposed the first

version of the standard called SensorML

(SensorML, 2007), thought to support real-time

sensor data.

Quite recently RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

has been recently extended in an effort to use the

concept of feeds within a geographical-aware

context. GeoRSS was thought to add geographical

dimension to simple RSS XML based messages

capable to contain information related to an event

and related data such as author, title, text, abstract

etc.

At the moment three versions of GeoRSS exists:

 the W3C version, supporting geo-referenced

points

 the so-called Simple GeoRSS, supporting

heights and areas

 The GeoRSS GML also known as Pro GeoRSS

a further extension supporting geometrical

content through formalization in GML mark-

up language (GML, 2007).

None of them has reached the full status of a

mature standard.

4 THE APPLICATION SCENARIO

The work presented emerged from a precise

requirement emerging from the local public

administration. This required a client-server

software infrastructure to be used by technicians,

engineers, administrator to access the vast

geographical dataset which constitute the latest

Urban Plan of the provincial of Trento in Italy. The

project, which has been commissioned by

department of urban planning, has brought to the

creation of a set of web based services, available

throughout the public network of the provincial

offices, to access and interact with geographical

information.

From the technical point of view the project has

brought to the development of a client-server

architecture where several 3D Geobrowsers access

in real-time a number of repositories containing the

geographical data. The architecture of the client

application has been based on the WorldWind

libraries from NASA which have been extended to

cope with the specific requirements of the provincial

authority. The server applications have been

developed with the aim of creating a very fast

infrastructure capable of serving a large amount of

clients at very high speed.

For this the project has brought to the

development of a set of classes capable to pre-

process and compress the data available from the

provincial plan according to an optimized data

structure which is then sent via the network and then

used by the client application.

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The main challenge of the project was set by the

sheer size of the dataset to be accessed by operators.

In fact the urban plan covers the entire province

territory, one of the widest in Italy, with a total

surface of 6.200 square kilometres at very high

resolution yielding several hundreds of Gigabytes of

data to be made accessible over the web. In fact the

base for the visualization of the territory is an

orthophoto with a resolution of 1 pixel per square

meter, covering the entire surface of provincial

territory. Further geographical information is

structured in more than 130 layers dealing with a

number of different themes such as:

 Data of environmental interest, such as

protected areas, hydrograph information,

natural parks, natural reserves, lakes, skiing

areas, agricultural areas, glaciers etc.

 Data related to infrastructure, such as power

lines, streets, layers, airports, sewage etc.

 Data of interest for urban planning, such as

public infrastructure, administration borders,

areas to be used for dwelling, industrial areas

etc.

5 TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT

The work presented in this paper has followed a

service based architecture (see Figure 1) and it has

been completely developed in Java on both client

and server side, thus ensuring maximum portability.

Figure 1: The system architecture.

The client application, which makes use of the

WorldWind libraries (NASA, 2007), has been

deployed as a Java Web Start. This way operator can

start the application with no need for installing any

specific software.

As shown in Figure 1 as soon as the application

is started this starts to make a number or requests to

a set of server-side application deployed as servlets.

These are capable to provide access to a wide range

of data necessary to administrators and planners to

operate ranging from vector data, to geo-referenced

images to GeoRSS feeds.

Specifically, requests include standard Web Map

Service (WMS, 2007), in order to access imagery of

the territory as well as rasterized geo-referenced

vector information (see Figure 2). The data is

requested to the repositories through WMS calls

which are received by a servlet which takes care of

forwarding the request to the relevant repository and

back to the client. The servlet responsible to manage

the repositories has been developed in order to pre-

process geographical data rendered by a standard

UMN map server (UMN, 2007) at multiple level of

resolutions, to compress it and to store it as binary

within an optimised data structure at the server side.

Pre-processing of static imagery provides a very

consistent increment, in terms of performance, if

compared with direct queries to a map server.

Benchmarks have shown how the developed

architecture is capable to return geo-referenced

images as result of a WMS query more than ten

times faster than relying on standard UMN map

server to resolve WMS requests.

Figure 2: A view of showing images of the territory and

rasterized vector information.

Several operators at the same time can thus use

client applications to access a number of different

repositories containing the data relative to the urban

plan of the entire Province.

Furthermore it is possible to manage the history

of the development of the territory by providing

access to previous edition of the urban plan. This

becomes an extremely useful feature as it allows

both versioning of different planning choices as well

as overlapping of different planning solutions.

This architecture, currently being used by the

planning department in their daily activities, has

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157

been further extended to support access to real-time

data by using GeoRSS feeds.

Several factors have brought to the choice of

using GeoRSS. First GeoRSS feeds, for their very

nature, are an ideal technology for syndication that is

to distribute information to a wide range of users

through different means. The main advantage of

GeoRSS is therefore to facilitate re-distribution and

widespread access to data through a subscription-

based approach.

For this the client functionalities have been

extended to allow user to interactively create a new

real-time event by generating a new GeoRSS feed.

This is done by selecting the proper option on the

GUI and by clicking on the position within the 3D

scene where the event is localised. The user can then

add textual information on the nature of the event.

Further taking advantage of the GeoRSS support

for GML geometries the user can send also other

geometrically-related information. As illustrated in

figure 3 the created GeoRSS feed in fact can contain

further XML geometrical description of geo-

referenced geometrical content described as GML -

Geography Mark-up Language (GML, 2007).

Figure 3: The logical structure of the GeoRSS GML feed

generated by each user.

This allows sending geometrical geo-referenced

data to users with the textual information specified

within the RSS content tag. As a result the user can

draw geometries directly within his/her web-based

Geobrowser.

As illustrated in Figure 4, a polygon can be

drawn directly within the 3D scene thus identifying

areas characterised by a certain feature, for instance

showing the presence of pollution or road

congestion. The region of interest can be either

directly sketched within the 3D scene, retrieved

from a geo-database or simply loaded through a

shape file.

The importance of operating directly within a 3D

environment is essential as the nature of layout of

the terrain can have profound impacts on planning

activities (for instance when planning a new road).

As soon as the geometry is confirmed the user

can submit the feed with associated description and

geometry which is then sent to the central server (see

Figure 1). Here the feed is processed by a servlet

which in turn stores it within the database.

Figure 4: Two screenshots of the system. (TOP) the user

has identified an area (in light red) characterised by traffic

congestion. (BOTTOM) The client has received and

rendered several feeds which are shown as polygons

draped on the terrain.

At this stage the new feed is notified to all other

users registered with the relevant topic, graphically

represented by a further layer within the web based

Geobrowser. As a result all users will be able to see

the new geometry and by clicking on it they will be

able to read the related information.

A further advantage of this approach is that

information can be searched according to their

geographical position as well for their content. The

user in fact can, at any time, use a standard query-

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based approach to enquiry the central repository for

any specific feed.

Figure 5: A screenshot of the query interface.

6 CONCLUSIONS

The work described in this paper clearly emphasizes

the global need for suitable web-based IT tools for

geographical information capable to better support

environmental management. Access to web-based

real-time information within 3D geo-referenced

environments can potentially yield to increased

prediction of disasters, better protection of human

lives and reduced cost caused by environmental

threats.

This paper has shown the detail of a web-based

architecture used to access interactively a variety of

themes and real-time information at a regional scale.

The resulting infrastructure has been deployed in a

real life context and it is used, during the daily

activities of the planning department of a provincial

authority in Italy. This clearly shows how these web-

GIS 3D technology are paving the way for a brand

new way of managing geographical information of

public interest.

This is in line with a number of international

initiatives to provide web-service-based planning

tools capable to exploit environmental geographic

data. Most of these initiatives are being carried on

by OGC® and it represents an effort on

harmonization with a number of emerging ISO

standards. This is an emerging trend which is fuelled

by international regulations such as the European

INSPIRE directive. This trend is fostering research

and development in a number of key fields whose

results will converge into the creation of an

interactive, networked software infrastructure

capable to provide collaborative management and

decision support, in an integrated way, in the context

of environmental support at the EU level.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Part of the achievements discussed in this paper as

well as the data shown in the images is the result of

a project commissioned by the Planning Department

of the Autonomous Provincia of Trento, Italy. Part

of the work has also been carried on as result of the

Framework Program between Graphitech and the

University of Trento.

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