Ernesto Marcheggiani

FlowSampler: Visual Analysis of Urban Flows in Geolocated Social Media Data

Analysis of flows such as human movement can help spatial planners better understand territorial patterns in urban environments. In this paper, we describe FlowSampler, an interactive visual interface designed for spatial planners to gather, extract and analyse human flows in geolocated social media data. Our system adopts a graph-based approach to infer movement pathways from spatial point type data and expresses the resulting information through multiple linked multiple visualisations to support data exploration. We describe two use cases to demonstrate the functionality of our system and characterise how spatial planners utilise it to address analytical task.

Detection of Fast Landscape Changes: The Case of Solar Modules on Agricultural Land

Fast land changes may lead to new unadaptive structures and functions and may remain unnoticed causing national as well as local land survey agencies to be ineffective. This argument will be displayed by means of a real case in central Italy and by focusing on the booming sprawl of photovoltaic solar modules on arable land. In Marche Region such a change has come about with an exponential pace in terms of area coverage. The figure emerging from our experimental survey shows 800 ha of arable lands sealed over the overall regional area in less than 7 years. So far, planning permissions to install solar modules are no longer acknowledged with ease on agricultural land and the subsidies have declined. Since solar technologies are a new promising land use frontier in agricultural land, a “standstill” may not be the best policy response. Land use policies should be able to respond to rapid changes, but this starts with rapid update of the effective land use practices. A positive feedback would come from open and volunteered geo-information.

Smart maintenance of riverbanks using a standard data layer and Augmented Reality

Linear buffer strips (BS) along watercourses are commonly adopted to reduce run-off, accumulation of bank-top sediments and the leaking of pesticides into fresh-waters, which strongly increase water pollution. However, the monitoring of their conditions is a difficult task because they are scattered over wide rural areas. This work demonstrates the benefits of using a standard data layer and Augmented Reality (AR) in watershed control and outlines the guideline of a novel approach for the health-check of linear BS. We designed a mobile environmental monitoring system for smart maintenance of riverbanks by embedding the AR technology within a Geographical Information System (GIS). From the technological point of view, the systems architecture consists of a cloud-based service for data sharing, using a standard data layer, and of a mobile device provided with a GPS based AR engine for augmented data visualization. The proposed solution aims to ease the overall inspection process by reducing the time required to run a survey. Indeed, ordinary operational survey conditions are usually performed basing the fieldwork on just classical digitized maps. Our application proposes to enrich inspections by superimposing information on the device screen with the same point of view of the camera, providing an intuitive visualization of buffer strip location. This way, the inspection officer can quickly and dynamically access relevant information overlaying geographic features, comments and other contents in real time. The solution has been tested in fieldwork to prove at what extent this cutting-edge technology contributes to an effective monitoring over large territorial settings. The aim is to encourage officers, land managers and practitioners toward more effective monitoring and management practices. HighlightsDefinition of a standard data layer for describing riverbank maintenance.Combination of GIS and Augmented Reality for on-site mobile visualization.Methodology to provide authorities with a smart monitoring tool.Health-check of linear vegetated buffer strips protecting riverbanks.Effective decision-making chain and containment of risk.

The characterisation of living landscapes: the role of mixed descriptors and volunteering geographic information

Over the last decade the need for public bodies to characterise the vitality and degree of sustainability of their territories is well acknowledged. Still it remains unclear how to integrate the different categories of values of our daily life places in a comprehensive way in order to develop appropriate and well balanced policies. An experimental case has been designed to provide novel sets of indicators by integrating information extracted from custom maps, spatial descriptors of land use and land cover and socio-economic indicators. In order to fully grasp the character of a living place, the nuances of less tangible aspects should be also understood. To do so, the results developed during first steps have been subsequently refined by incorporating relevant volunteering geographical information available on Google Earth® platform.

Cyberarchaeology: Improved Way Findings for Archaeological Parks Through Mobile Augmented Reality

Latest improvement on mobile devices capabilities definitively changed the way people experience their surroundings. Thanks to the improvement of built in sensors, devices are able to sense the environment at users’ location. The ability to provide contextual services to the visitors is a key aspect to make public parks more accessible, comprehensible end enjoyable. The paper outlines the application of Augmented Reality technologies in a real case scenario. The aim is to equip visitors with an ICT tool able to enhance their perception visiting open spaces and parks. The reporting area chosen for the study case is an Archaeological park, the Cardeto, located within an urban green open space in the outskirts of Ancona, a city in central Italy. Ensuring the success of the experiment has required an hybrid approach, with the main objective of providing visitors with an endless flow of information, anytime and anywhere. To reach this result, a mobile application has been developed, exploiting two different tracking systems: location-based and edge-based. The first one helps users to move along with a network of given Points of Interest disseminated within the park. At the same time, the second system displays a rich set of information each time a user came in close the proximity with artefacts or valuable heritages. This work is part of a wider ongoing project aiming at a better understanding of the potentials inherent the design space for smartphones in context-aware AR applications for tourists. Our experiment demonstrates the validity of purposed methodology as a promising solution for Cultural Heritage purposes.

Comparison Between Two Rural-Suburban Landscapes from Brussels and Milan

This chapter reports a research done by Ingegnoli V (university of Milan) and Marcheggiani E, Gulinck H, Lerouge F. (university of Leuven). Many queries arise on the bionomic state of these landscapes, presenting similar historical and climatic characters. A question regards the high amount of private gardens, as a “cultural” protective compensation to the urban expansion. Another question is the bionomic evaluation of forests, and whether there might be protected areas with lower ecological efficiency than non-protected one. A third question is concerned with the landscape type: does it remain in a range of agricultural types or does it reach the rural–suburban structure? Mostly, we have to check if the present condition of Asse could be similar to the bionomic state of Bollate, or in case they differ, how their transformation dynamics during the past two centuries would have been different.