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Increase in access to mobile phone devices and social media networks has changed the way people report and respond to disasters. Community-driven initiatives such as Stand By Task Force (SBTF) or GISCorps have shown great potential by crowdsourcing the acquisition, analysis, and geolocation of social media data for disaster responders. These initiatives face two main challenges: (1) most of social media content such as photos and videos are not geolocated, thus preventing the information to be used by emergency responders, and (2) they lack tools to manage volunteers contributions and aggregate them in order to ensure high quality and reliable results. This paper illustrates the use of a crowdsourcing platform that combines automatic methods for gathering information from social media and crowdsourcing techniques, in order to manage and aggregate volunteers contributions. High precision geolocation is achieved by combining data mining techniques for estimating the location of photos and videos from social media, and crowdsourcing for the validation and/or improvement of the estimated location. The evaluation of the proposed approach is carried out using data related to the Amatrice Earthquake in 2016, coming from Flickr, Twitter and Youtube. A common data set is analyzed and geolocated by both the volunteers using the proposed platform and a group of experts. Data quality and data reliability is assessed by comparing volunteers versus experts results. Final results are shown in a web map service providing a global view of the information social media provided about the Amatrice Earthquake event., International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, XLII-3/W8, ISSN:1682-1750, ISSN:2194-9034, ISSN:1682-1777

The starting point for developing a new map was defined by the requirements of the “MeinGrün” project (can be translated as ‘my green’ project). The aim is the development of a mobile app, which enables routing to urban areas, including suggestions for attractive places for different activities. A specific map style was designed to communicate information related to green spaces effectively and to make users excited about the topic of the project.Among other reasons, we also want to apply our knowledge on vector tile generation and use it in teaching. For the demonstration of our research on generalization, it is beneficial to offer a web map service because such a service allows illustrating developed methods and results. Finally, the experience enables us to train students in the design and development of customized styles for zoomable web maps.The aim is to build a map service with several zoom levels up to small scales using data from OpenStreetMap and NaturalEarth. For better adaptivity, it is aimed to offer the map as vector and raster tiles with the same style. Besides, making high-resolution raster tiles available for retina displays is considered as well. The rationale is that everyone can choose the appropriate method of delivery for different contexts of application. These requirements result in some technological challenges: provide vector and raster tiles at the same time and style, keep the computation time for an update, and generation low. For providing and delivering up to date data, on-the-fly map generalization has been implemented, e.g., scale-dependent selection, simplification, and aggregation of various features.Figure 1 shows our result, a map in warm colors, and a reduced information load for serving a reference map. The visualization of roads with a simple line is unique, but this was also the intension of the applied research project: the production of something unique and easy rememberable for the “MeinGrün” project. The hill-shading uses raster tiles while all other map features work with vector tiles.The data transformation from the OpenStreetMap format to the spatial PostgreSQL/PostGIS database has been applied with IMPOSM, a well-documented and efficient tool. GDAL is used to import the NaturalEarth data and doing some processing steps. PostgreSQL and its spatial extension PostGIS serve in many web-mapping projects as a data store and offer a wide range of options for processing data. After specified queries are applied, the t_rex software generates the vector tiles from the database, which are then packed as MBtiles using mbutil. Finally, Tileserver GL is used to serve vector and raster tiles, including further necessary additions such as style, sprites, and glyphs.To sum up, we already have a working service, which is available on our server with an ongoing blog about the project. Still, it is a work on progress project that needs further research and development. For example, the integration of Wikipedia/Wikidata information for selecting place by their importance, transliteration of no-Latin place names for a world-wide coverage, and more and better labeling of features. Now the map extent is scale depended and covers at low zoom levels the whole world. In contrast, the higher zoom levels are only available in Dresden and Heidelberg to match the requirements of the “MeinGrün” project but will be extended in the future.

Work over the last decade has resulted in standardised web services and tools that can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of working with meteorological and ocean model data. While many operational modelling centres have enabled query and access to data via common web services, most small research groups have not. The penetration of this approach into the research community, where IT resources are limited, can be dramatically improved by (1) making it simple for providers to enable web service access to existing output files; (2) using free technologies that are easy to deploy and configure; and (3) providing standardised, service-based tools that work in existing research environments. We present a simple, local brokering approach that lets modellers continue to use their existing files and tools, while serving virtual data sets that can be used with standardised tools. The goal of this paper is to convince modellers that a standardised framework is not only useful but can be implemented with modest effort using free software components. We use NetCDF Markup language for data aggregation and standardisation, the THREDDS Data Server for data delivery, pycsw for data search, NCTOOLBOX (MATLAB®) and Iris (Python) for data access, and Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Service for data preview. We illustrate the effectiveness of this approach with two use cases involving small research modelling groups at NATO and USGS.

We present a new open and global database of cosmogenic radionuclide and luminescence measurements in fluvial sediment. With support from the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) we have built infrastructure for hosting and maintaining the data at the University of Wollongong and making this available to the research community via an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant Web Map Service. The cosmogenic radionuclide (CRN) part of the database consists of 10Be and 26Al measurements in fluvial sediment samples along with ancillary geospatial vector and raster layers, including sample site, basin outline, digital elevation model, gradient raster, flow direction and flow accumulation rasters, atmospheric pressure raster, and CRN production scaling and topographic shielding factor rasters. Sample metadata is comprehensive and includes all necessary information for the recalculation of denudation rates using CAIRN, an open source program for calculating basin-wide denudation rates from 10Be and 26Al data. Further all data have been recalculated and harmonised using the same program. The luminescence part of the database consists of thermoluminescence (TL) and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) measurements in fluvial sediment samples from stratigraphic sections and sediment cores from across the Australian continent, and includes ancillary vector and raster geospatial data. The repository and visualisation system enable easy search and discovery of available data. Use of open standards also ensures that data layers are visible to other OGC compliant data sharing services. Thus, OCTOPUS will turn data that was previously invisible to those not within the CRN and luminescence research communities into a findable resource. This aspect is of importance to industry or local government who are yet to discover the value of geochronological data in, amongst others, placing human impacts on the environment into context. The availability of the repository and its associated data curation framework will provide the opportunity for researchers to store, curate, recalculate and re-use previously published but otherwise unusable CRN and luminescence data. This delivers the potential to harness old but valuable data that would otherwise be "lost" to the research community. The streamlined repository and transparent data re-analysis framework will also reduce research time and avoid duplication of effort, which will be highly attractive to other researchers. OCTOPUS can be accessed at https://earth.uow.edu.au. The data collections can also be accessed via the following DOIs: http://dx.doi.org/10.4225/48/5a8367feac9b2 (CRN International), http://dx.doi.org/10.4225/48/5a836cdfac9b5 (CRN Australia), and http://dx.doi.org/10.4225/48/5a836db1ac9b6 (OSL & TL Australia).

The dawn of GeoWeb 2.0, the geographic extension of Web 2.0, has opened new possibilities in terms of online dissemination and sharing of geospatial contents, thus laying the foundations for a fruitful development of Participatory GIS (PGIS). The purpose of the study is to investigate the extension of PGIS applications, which are quite mature in the traditional bi-dimensional framework, up to the third dimension. More in detail, the system should couple a powerful 3D visualization with an increase of public participation by means of a tool allowing data collecting from mobile devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets). The PGIS application, built using the open source NASA World Wind virtual globe, is focussed on the cultural and tourism heritage of Como city, located in Northern Italy. An authentication mechanism was implemented, which allows users to create and manage customized projects through cartographic mash-ups of Web Map Service (WMS) layers. Saved projects populate a catalogue which is available to the entire community. Together with historical maps and the current cartography of the city, the system is also able to manage geo-tagged multimedia data, which come from user field-surveys performed through mobile devices and report POIs (Points Of Interest). Each logged user can then contribute to POIs characterization by adding textual and multimedia information (e.g. images, audios and videos) directly on the globe. All in all, the resulting application allows users to create and share contributions as it usually happens on social platforms, additionally providing a realistic 3D representation enhancing the expressive power of data.

Spatial analysis packages and thematic mapping are available in a number of traditional desktop GIS. However, visualizing thematic maps through the Internet is still limited to fix contents and restrict changes of the input data. The users with limited GIS knowledge or people who do not own digital map data are normally having difficulties to create output thematic maps from generic data. In this study, we developed thematic mapping services that can be applied to non-spatial data format served through powerful map services solutions. Novice users who have no GIS software experience or have no digital base map can simply input a plain text file with location identifier field such as place name or gazetteer to generate thematic maps online. We implemented a prototype by using web service standards recommended by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) such as Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD) to provide a principle for communication and allow users to visualize spatial information as thematic maps. The system dedicates a great deal of effort to the initial study of geospatial analysis and visualization for novice users including those with no past experience using Geographic Information Systems.

We present a web service based tool for the planning of atmospheric research flights. The tool provides online access to horizontal maps and vertical cross-sections of numerical weather prediction data and in particular allows the interactive design of a flight route in direct relation to the predictions. It thereby fills a crucial gap in the set of currently available tools for using data from numerical atmospheric models for research flight planning. A distinct feature of the tool is its lightweight, web service based architecture, requiring only commodity hardware and a basic Internet connection for deployment. Access to visualisations of prediction data is achieved by using an extended version of the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Service (WMS) standard, a technology that has gained increased attention in meteorology in recent years. With the WMS approach, we avoid the transfer of large forecast model output datasets while enabling on-demand generated visualisations of the predictions at campaign sites with limited Internet bandwidth. Usage of the Web Map Service standard also enables access to third-party sources of georeferenced data. We have implemented the software using the open-source programming language Python. In the present article, we describe the architecture of the tool. As an example application, we discuss a case study research flight planned for the scenario of the 2010 Eyjafjalla volcano eruption. Usage and implementation details are provided as Supplement.