Special Issue "Internet and Landscapes"

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Christopher Pettit
Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network, Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Building, The University of Melbourne, Level 5, Architecture Building, Victoria 3010, Australia
Website: http://www.aurin.org.au
E-Mail:
Interests: visualisation; GIS; planning support systems; e-science

Guest Editor
Dr. Arzu Coltekin
Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 80750 Zürich, Switzerland
E-Mail:
Phone: +41 44 635 5440
Fax: +41 44 635 5848
Interests: geovisualization; visual analytics; virtual reality; vision; visualization; human computer interaction; design; spatio-temporal analysis

Dear Colleagues,

The Internet has become a ubiquitous platform for communicating and disseminating geographic information. There are a plethora of online resources and tools available to share information and develop a better understanding of both our natural and built landscapes. These include: information repositories, website and portals containing both static and dynamic information. With the recent advent of web 2.0 there has been a rapid expansion in the number of online tools and technologies for which we can learn, share and address issues facing society such as climate change, food security and human well-being. Such tools including: photo sharing, map mash-ups, geo-tagging tools, virtual globes and collaborative virtual worlds are providing new ways for society to explore and understand past present and future landscapes.

This special issue is an initiative of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) WG II/ 6 for Geographical Visualization and Virtual Reality. In this special issue we encourage the submission of papers which broadly cover the theme of landscape and the internet. Papers which address new research developments in online geographies and tools for communicating and understanding landscape function, form and processes; whether they are urban or natural will be considered.

Particular areas of interest include:

• Recent advances in online geographical / landscape visualization
• Novel Landscape information repositories, websites, and portals
• Collaborative web 2.0 approaches for communicating landscapes
• Research, development and applications of virtual globe technologies
• Development s in 3D spatial data infrastructure and object libraries
• Innovative applications in immersive and semi-immersive virtual reality
• Evaluating the usefulness and usability of online geographical visualization tools
• The geographies of virtual worlds and online communities
• Advances of mobile computing devices in understanding landscapes
• Online spatial decision support systems for landscape planning

Christopher Pettit
Guest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 300 CHF (Swiss Francs). English correction and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF (Swiss Francs) will be charged in certain cases for those articles accepted for publication that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.

Type of Paper: Review
Title: High Quality Geographic Services and Bandwidth Limitations
Authors: Arzu Coltekin and Tumasch Reichenbacher
Affiliation: GIScience-GIVA, Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland; E-Mails: arzu.coltekin@geo.uzh.ch (A.C.); tumach.reichenbacher@geo.uzh.ch (T.R.)
Abstract: Bandwidth limitations often force us to rethink our design on at least two accounts. We search solutions from a visualization perspective and a software engineering one. We need ways to reduce the amount of data that is to be visualized and to be transmitted. In contrast, today’s sensors and instruments can produce very high resolution data and Web 2.0 further allows “bottom-up” creation of rich and diverse content. This means the amount of information we have for creating useful and usable maps is more than ever before. But how much of it can we really use online? Within this article we review the current status, solutions, and future directions of dealing with bandwidth limitations in diverse networked environments. We treat the subject in three categories: technology, design and communication, social issues. The technology part summarizes the current hardware and software solutions to deal with limited bandwidth. The design and communication part reviews the current solutions to problems that come with networked map services, e.g., various screen sizes, taking the efforts to make informed design choices and empirical user studies into account. The part that deals with social issues reviews the current discourse on volunteered geographic information (Web 2.0) and privacy issues that come with ‘geo-location’ applications.
We hope that our systematic documentation and critical review will help researchers and practitioners in the field and in related fields to understand the current state of the art better.

Title: Extension Activity Support System (EASY)
Authors: Lowell, K. ¹, Smith, L. ², Miller, I. ², Pettit, C. ³
Affiliations: ¹ Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information, Ground floor, 723 Swanston Street, University of Melbourne, VIC 3010 Australia; E-Mail: klowell@crcsi.com.au
² Spatial Vision, Level 2, 170 Queen St Melbourne, VIC, 3000  Australia; E-Mails: Lindsay.Smith@spatialvision.com.au (L.S.);
Ian.Miller@spatialvision.com.au (I.M.)
³ Department of Primary Industries Victoria, Parkville Centre, P.O. Box 4166, Parkville, vic 3052  Australia; E-Mail: christopher.pettit@dpi.vic.gov.au
Abstract: In response to disparate advances in delivering spatial information to support agricultural extension activities, the Extension Activity Support System (EASY) was established to develop a vision statement for such a system based on a national needs assessment. The long-term goal of the EASY project is to establish a national system that meets the needs identified. Personnel from four states were consulted and a review of existing farm information/management software undertaken to ensure that any system that is eventually produced will build on the strengths of existing efforts. The following vision statement for EASY emerged: EASY will be a freely available, open, extensible online system where researchers, agricultural program managers, agricultural consultants, extension staff and landholders create and exchange spatial and other information for use in agricultural planning and management. EASY will be a platform that enables collaborative knowledge building for improving the productivity and sustainability of agricultural practice. To demonstrate some of the EASY concepts that can address some of the needs identified, a working software demonstrator was developed in the Adobe Flash environment; Flash provides a highly interactive, rich user experience and provides all of the required multi-media tools required to demonstrate the potential of the proposed EASY system. The demonstrator is neither a functional GIS nor is it a fully operational prototype. However, it but does provide working examples of four use cases: 1) Base map viewing and property definition, 2) Create a topic package, 3) Use a topic package, and 4) View and analyse temporal data sets.

Title: Low-Cost Mapping and Publishing Methods for Slum-Upgrading Projects
Authors: Philip Paar ¹ and Jörg Rekittke ²
Affiliations: ¹ Visiting Senior Research Scientist, School of Design and Environment, Department of  Architecture, 4 Architecture Drive, 117566, Singapore; E-Mail: paar@laubwerk.com
² National University of Singapore (NUS), School of Design and Environment, Department of Architecture, 4 Architecture Drive, 117566, Singapore;
E-Mail: rekittke@nus.edu.sg
Abstract: In 2001, virtually one billion people lived in urban slums. It is projected that in 2030 the global number of slum dwellers will increase to about 2 billion, if no significant changes are taking place (UN HABITAT, 2003). Slum areas are the most unsurveyed and thus most untraceable parts of megacities. Although some dwellers have access to the Internet, their informal settlements frequently appear as white spots— unmapped areas and neglected space on official maps and planning materials. As a form of illegal land use, slums are blinded out from the radar of governmental cartographers, planners, and online maps. Accordingly, Google Streetview and Teleatlas forgo the areas where the poor live. The majority of urban slums shows no street names and no formal addresses. No wonder that informal settlers extensively live in non-consideration.Specialist, volunteers and students who intend to work in these neighborhoods are downright dependent on taxi drivers familiar with the place, drivers of other adventurous wheelers, local organizations and local guides to bring them there. This has happened to the authors and their students in the course of academic studio and fieldwork (Rekittke & Paar, 2010). Recently, the collaborative research project “Grassroots GIS. Development of low-cost mapping and publishing methods for slums and slum-upgrading projects in Manila” has been launched. In this project mobile devices, collaborative mapping and 3D visualization applications are systematically employed to support landscape architectural analysis and design work in the context of urban poverty and informal settlements. The project is developing and testing approaches and workflows for local actors and geographical amateurs using low-cost or open source applications such as SketchUp, GPS tracking Apps, Open Street Map, and the digital globes Google Earth and Biosphere3D. The staggering mega-urban environments of the poorest of the poor are used as a worst-case laboratory to test state-of-the-art smartphones and their geo-related applications on site for their capability of delivering reliable geo-data and providing socially and design relevant services. The research hypothesis reads as follows:Grass Roots GIS can provide elementary planning material for the design process of systematic slum upgrading initiatives and it can contribute to the step-by-step deliverance of informal settlers from non-consideration and addresslessness. Placing the design proposals and project areas on a digital globe, adds geographical and could lead to spatial identity, comprehensiveness and enhanced understanding of design proposals to the otherwise untraceable informal worlds in the haystack of the megacity. The possibility to fly to new addresses and entries on online maps and on digital globes presumably sharpens the sense of orientation and spatial sense. The paper will document first results of the three-year research project, including applications and experiences in the field.

Title:Advances in Networked Digital Landscapes: Mass Modelling and Visualization
Author: Andrew Hudson-Smith
Affiliation: Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London 1-19 Torrington Place, Gower Street, London, WC1E 7HB, UK
Abstract: There is a renaissance in the world of geographic visualization, new tools, techniques and tutorials are arriving onto the scene on an almost daily basis. Development cycles have shortened and innovation is at an all time high thanks largely to the rise in web based services. With this change the amount of information available to the visualizer has increased considerably; tools techniques and tutorials are now available to anyone who has the time to search YouTube, Vimeo or any number
of blogs. This paper firstly explores these changes in relation to tools such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Virtual Earth and Second Life. Secondly it goes on to look at mobile devices for visualization ‘in the field’. With the iPhone and Android handsets allowing basic augmented reality the toolkit is becoming mobile. Indeed combined with freely available modeling software such as Google SketchUp linked up to the Google 3D Warehouse, mobile handsets are becoming the current capture device of choice. All of these tools mentioned so far are part of the rise of Web 2.0 linked to, amongst others, the concepts of crowd sourcing and volunteered geographic information. The ‘crowd’ is perhaps the most important part of using and exploiting emerging visualization techniques. We explore this in terms of blogs and the rash of tutorials now online in what was once a niche field of academic exploration. The pre ‘Google’ days of gaining complicated license agreements for even the most simple use of data, expensive high end software and the need for powerful dedicated hardware are behind us. The rise of Web 2.0 and the introduction of the term ‘Neogeography’ in the field of geo-visualization maybe controversial but it is the here and now. Whereas the most impressive geographic visualization only 6 years ago was carried out on Silicon Graphics Engines costing in excess of $1 million, it is now on sub $150 Xbox 360 gaming consoles. In the final part of the paper, we look at the use of online gaming software for geographic visualization, ranging from systems such as ‘Crysis’ through to ‘Unity’, gaming offers notable potential for both urban and landscape visualization over the Internet, visualized by and modelled by the masses.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Tool or Toy? Digital Globes in Landscape Planning
Authors: Olaf Schroth, Ellen Pond, Cam Campbell, Petr Cizek and Stephen R. J. Sheppard
Affiliation: CALP, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia UBC, 2045-2424 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada;
E-Mails: schrotho@interchange.ubc.ca (O.S.); epond@interchange.ubc.ca (E.P.); dccampbe@interchange.ubc.ca (C.C.); pcizek@interchange.ubc.ca (P.C.); Stephen.Sheppard@ubc.ca (S.R.J.S.)
Abstract: Since Al Gore sketched the vision of a digital earth, geobrowsers that integrate multi-scale and multi-temporal data from various sources, based on a globe metaphor, have developed into serious tools that various stakeholders in landscape planning, from community groups to government planners, have started using. Although these tools originate from Geographic Information Systems (GIS), they have become a different tool set with specific limitations and new opportunities on their own. Expectations regarding their utility as planning and community engagement tools are high, but are tempered by both technical limitations and ethical issues (Sheppard and Cizek 2009; Goodchild 2008).  The results from the Kimberley Climate Adaptation Project case study (British Columbia) are used to illustrate the potential benefits and risks associated with the use of digital globes in participatory landscape-planning initiatives. Novel technologies for representing vegetation in a digital globe are applied in the case study. Based on observations, questionnaires and 17 in-depth interviews with stakeholders and community members using an interactive 3D model of regional climate change impacts and possible adaptation and mitigation scenarios, the range of benefits and limitations of digital globes as a tool for participatory landscape planning are discussed.  Results suggest that while digital globes can facilitate spatio-temporal understanding of local climate change risks and mitigation and adaptation scenarios, for landscape related tasks, the visualization capabilities of Google Earth are limited.  As well, the initial findings suggest not all user groups benefit equally from the tool. Recommendations about how the risks of misinterpretation can be caveated and managed by thoroughly integrating the application and interpretation of digital globes into face-to-face planning processes will also be presented.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Natural Resource Knowledge and Information Management via the Victorian Resources Online Website
Authors: Mark Imhof ¹, Matthew Cox ², Angela Fadersen ³, Wayne Harvey ³, Sonia Thompson ², David Rees ² and Christopher Pettit ⁴
Affiliation: ¹ Future Farming Systems Research Division, Department of Primary Industries, 1301 Hazeldean Road, Ellinbank 3821, Victoria, Australia
² Future Farming Systems Research Division, Department of Primary Industries, 32 Lincoln Square North, Carlton 3053, Victoria, Australia; E-Mails: matthew.cox@dpi.vic.gov.au (M.C.); sonia.thompson@dpi.vic.gov.au (S.T.); david.rees@dpi.vic.gov.au (D.R.)
³ Future Farming Systems Research Division, Department of Primary Industries, Cnr Midland Highway and Taylor Street, Epsom 3551, Victoria, Australia; E-Mails: angela.fadersen@dpi.vic.gov.au (A.F.); wayne.harvey@dpi.vic.gov.au (W.H.)
⁴ Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network, Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Building, The University of Melbourne, Level 5, Architecture Building, Victoria 3010, Australia; E-Mail: cpettit@unimelb.edu.au
Abstract: Since 1997, the Victorian Resources Online (VRO) website (http://www.dpi.vic.gov.au/vro) has been a key means for the dissemination of landscape-based natural resources information via the internet in Victoria, Australia. The website currently consists of approximately 11,000 web pages, including 1900 maps and 1000 downloadable documents. Information is provided at a range of scales—from statewide and regional overviews to more detailed catchment and sub-catchment levels. At all these levels of generalisation, information is arranged in an organisationally agnostic way around key knowledge “domains” (e.g., soil, landform, water). VRO represents a useful model for the effective dissemination of a wide range of natural resources information; relying on partnerships with key subject matter experts and data custodians, including a “knowledge network” of retired land resource assessment specialists. In this paper, case studies are presented that illustrate various approaches to information and knowledge management with a focus on presentation of spatially contexted soil and landscape information at different levels of generalisation. Examples are provided of adapting site-based information into clickable maps that reveal site-specific details, as well as “spatialising” data from specialist internal databases to improve accessibility to a wider audience. Legacy information sources have also been consolidated and spatially referenced. More recent incorporation of interactive visualisation products (such as landscape panoramas, videos and animations) is providing interactive rich media content. Currently the site attracts an average of 1190 user visits per day and user evaluation has indicated a wide range of users, including students, teachers, consultants, researchers and extension staff. The wide range of uses for information and, in particular, the benefits for natural resource education, research and extension has also been identified.
Keywords: WWW; internet; spatial information; natural resources; soil; landscape; knowledge and information management; visualisation; animation