Daniel Rappo

Towards an Automated Label Placement Service

The main focus of this chapter is to introduce a new way to ease the integration of labelling placement functionalities from a given library: a programming-language independent solution based on a web service wrapper. Considering the GeoWeb allowing to combine geodata, mapping, and geoprocessing services to fulfil various needs, it is to give an answer to a current lack: there is no such an approach for delivering advanced labelling functionalities through a standardized web service. The chapter describes a solution to wrap PAL library using standards from Open Geospatial Consortium like Web Processing Service and Symbology Encoding.

GEOPOLL - Integrate Cartographic Questions in Web Forms, Polls or Surveys

Most of the web forms, polls or surveys are composed with classical input fields (check boxes, radio buttons, select lists, etc.) and a lot of standards web forms builders or services (e.g. Typeform, WuFoo, Google Forms, Survey Monkey, etc.) help to build and deploy them. Nowadays, offering a text area to catch a ZIP code or a select list to point out a country remains the best way to explicitly collect geospatial data. But what about mapping interfaces to integrate cartographic questions and/or cartographic answers as a more suitable solution? How to let form’s respondents indicate in which area(s) they engage in certain activities? The only way to solve these issues is by coding it yourself. This paper shows the design and technical problematic and try to give some solutions to build an efficient UX for the respondents and a standard answers treatment for the data analysts. This paper will also highlight the capacities of open source JavaScript library like OpenLayers to build the solution. Our interface was tested by the cities of Lausanne and Pully (Switzerland) and thousands of people answered to these cartographic forms on mobile and desktop. We would like to share some good practice and lessons learned. ∗Corresponding author Email address: adrien.bigler@heig-vd.ch (Adrien Bigler) Submitted to FOSS4G 2017 Conference Proceedings, Boston, USA. September 20, 2017 FOSS4G 2017 Academic Program GEOPOLL

Relationship between land cover type and Body Mass Index in Geneva

Past studies conducted in urban areas analyzed the impact of the presence of green spaces on public health, and highlighted in particular the psychological benefits of interacting with nature. To investigate a supposed relationship between overweight and dense built environment, we focused on the State of Geneva, Switzerland, and calculated the correlation between Body Mass Index (BMI) in a representative sample of 6663 adults and the percentage of natural areas at the locations where these individuals were living. To this end, we used population-based health data from the “Bus Santé” study (Geneva University Hospitals) and multi-scale land cover maps obtained by means of satellite images and LiDAR data classification. We found little correlation between BMI (as a proxy for health) and land cover data and were not able to verify the working hypothesis at local and regional scales. However, an important phenomenon highlighted here is the difference in the results obtained between the city center and the whole State.

Towards geoservices portals MEDIAMAPS: WGIS trends for business applications

The developments within the MEDIAMAPS project were motivated by the idea to provide small and medium companies with a solution to benefit from Web Business Geographic Applications (WBGA) advantages at an affordable price: a Webmapping application service with which the user only pays for used data and analysis processes. As one of the goals of this research was to give users the possibility to produce printed documents with spatial analysis results (maps), the main preoccupation was to find a technology allowing high-quality cartographic representation. Our interest led us towards SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), an open standard technology, official World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for delivering vector graphics on the Web. From the development of this tool several recurring thematic mapping and publishing aspects have come out: statistical ranges determination and related colour problems, data types and choropleth mapping, cartographic publishing rules. The MEDIAMAPS prototype shows how this kind of specific constraints can be implemented in a WGIS application.