Tien-Yin Chou

Integrating geographical information and augmented reality techniques for mobile escape guidelines on nuclear accident sites.

During nuclear accidents, when radioactive materials spread into the environment, the people in the affected areas should evacuate immediately. However, few information systems are available regarding escape guidelines for nuclear accidents. Therefore, this study constructs escape guidelines on mobile phones. This application is called Mobile Escape Guidelines (MEG) and adopts two techniques. One technique is the geographical information that offers multiple representations; the other is the augmented reality that provides semi-realistic information services. When this study tested the mobile escape guidelines, the results showed that this application was capable of identifying the correct locations of users, showing the escape routes, filtering geographical layers, and rapidly generating the relief reports. Users could evacuate from nuclear accident sites easily, even without relief personnel, since using slim devices to access the mobile escape guidelines is convenient. Overall, this study is a useful reference for a nuclear accident emergency response.

An integrated information system for real estate agency-based on service-oriented architecture

To enhance the efficiency of surfing the Internet, an integrated platform for real estate agency is established based on service-oriented architecture (SOA). It employs the concept of search engine and loads the information provided by each real estate agency to this platform. Due to various types of data structure from each real estate agency website, a unified format must be defined for integrating the information. In this paper, the format is defined by XML and used to integrate heterogeneous database. Also, the format includes the data fields the agency websites required. It is processed in the platform which is expandable by receiving information from other sources in the future. In consideration of the copyright regulation, the agents are allowed to login and to share specific information on this platform in order to increase the transaction rate. The system also includes a Google Map engine for GIS service that marks the spatial location as users send the requests. It helps users to find the demanded housing information and retrieve the nearby geographic location.

Spatial knowledge databases as applied to the detection of changes in urban land use

Changes in land can involve pressing and complex problems that urban areas need to resolve. Construction of a land use or land cover mechanism is an essential way of dealing with those problems. Based upon the difficulties that occur in investigations of land use, this study will focus on the development of a spatial knowledge database. The major function of a spatial knowledge database is to integrate spectral, GIS, aerial photos, and DEM information. In this study data from a series of periods for SPOT‐HRV XS images (1993, 1996, 1998) were collected. A decision‐tree concept was built into the image‐classification database to resolve the uncertainty of images in urban areas. The aim of this study is to provide an objective solution for efficiently classifying images in urban areas.

The implementation of SOA within grid structure for disaster monitoring

Nowadays, the administration and execution of disaster monitoring in Taiwan are able to achieve the goal of overall monitoring with the assistance of various tools and technology distributed in different organizations. Examples of information and technology include the data collected by monitoring stations, existing database and spatial data warehouse, precipitation information provided by the Central Weather Bureau (CWB), results of site investigation, Remotely Piloted Vehicle (RPV) airscape images, aerial photos, satellite images, and etc. Therefore, in order to facilitate tasks of disaster monitoring, heterogeneous data needs to be integrated via a consistent communication interface. The use of grids was proposed to solve the problems in heterogeneity, distribution, and efficiency triggered by networking. Information worth sharing is uploaded to a platform which can publish and register data and control the flow of information; users then access the platform to search and fetch valuable information and value-added applications. On the platform, all of the heterogeneous and distributed data is encrypted, decrypted, monitored, and hence interchangeable according to international standards. Because the employment of grid computing does not require large-scale modifications of existing systems, grids designed for different purposes are being developed. Our research adopts the emerging grid technology to create a grid-based disaster management mechanism. Taking disaster relief distribution as an example, we optimize the stockpile distribution and delivery routes by utilizing Sensor GRID and Application GRID and by combining the interpretation given by real-time traffic information systems. Our study will further the governments abilities to manage disasters, and substantially strengthen the cooperation and communication between the government and academic units.

Storage and processing of massive remote sensing images using a novel cloud computing platform

In recent years, the rapid development of remote sensing technology has proliferated high-quality images that occupy larger and larger storage spaces. Video has become widespread for environmental observation. Hence, digital data is growing exponentially, and geographic information systems must determine how to manage and process images and video effectively. Researchers cannot limit themselves to desktop PCs due to computational and storage limits. The aim of this article was to propose and implement an architectural design for a novel cloud computing platform based on two Web Coverage Service and Web Map Service interfaces from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), cloud storage from Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), and image processing from MapReduce. Results are presented on tablet computers (Asus transformer pad) and websites. Within this framework, we implemented image management as well as simple WebGIS and created an experiment in read/write performance with four kinds of data sets (normal distribution, skew to left, skew to right, and peak in left and right). For write/read performance with HDFS, the proposed system outperformed a local file system for large files (most files ranged from 8 MB to 10 MB), with many concurrent users (simulated threads equal to 40 or 50). An observer on the ground with a touchscreen can identify central points (man-made centroids) of real-time images by tapping the tablet with a finger. A second experiment revealed that the convergence for human intervention was better than convergence for random centroids in two kinds of cloud computing environments.

The present development of debris flow monitoring technology in Taiwan - A case study presentation

In order to document the on-site debris flow events, the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau (SWCB), Council of Agriculture, Taiwan, has de- voted to develop the debris flow monitoring system since 2002. This paper introduces the technology of 17 on-site and 3 mobile debris flow monitoring sta- tions established by SWCB in Taiwan. In each on-site monitoring station, several observation instruments including rain gauges, CCD cameras, wire sensors, geophones, and water level meters were installed to collect the dynamic debris flow information that can be used as the references for countermeasures of de- bris flow disaster mitigation. Besides, several mete - orological sensors are also adopted recently in order to record the long-term climate change effects on the slopeland of Taiwan. The framework of the debris flow monitoring system consists of monitoring sen- sors, instrumental cabin (vehicle platform for mobile station), transmission system and web-based display system. During the typhoon Mindulle period in 2004, a debris flow event in Aiyuzih creek was observed by the Shenmu debris flow monitoring station on July 2, Nantou County, central Taiwan. On-site observation data including the rainfall patterns, video images, wire sensor ruptures and ground vibrations caused by de- birs flows are analyzed in detail.

A SOA based debris flow monitoring system

Taiwan is located at the collision boundary of the Philippine sea plate and the Eurasian plate. The mountain terrain is precipitous and the region, on the whole, is characterized by fragile rocks and frequent seismic activity. In addition, the concentrated torrential rainfall brought by typhoons cause extensive disasters, debris flow, the most serious disaster caused by torrential rainfall, lead to very heavy casualties in recent years. There are 17 fixed debris flow monitoring stations and 2 mobile stations deployed in Taiwan. However, the whole architecture was designed in late 2000 and implemented by traditional and proprietary methodologies. Hence, several interoperability issues have been unveiled in the recent years when the needs of interoperability increased. In this study, we propose a whole new and open standards based debris flow monitoring architecture following the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. Relevant Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards (for example Web Processing Service, WPS specification and Sensor Web Enablement, SWE technologies) and advancements from Grid Computing where lead into the proposed architecture. The use of open standards and distributed computing technologies in the proposed architecture enables heterogeneous resources (data, processing and computing power) interoperability. This study also implements an OGC WPS Grid Processing Profile that was developed in the OGC Web Services, Phase 6 (OWS-6) initiative of the OGC Interoperability Program.

The Cloud-Based Sensor Data Warehouse

As advances in technology, sensors have been widely applied to various different fields. Sensor data with time characteristic, therefore after a long period of observation that demand for data storage and analysis are very large. The relational database is the most widely used database architecture that through the normalization process to design the table structure. The tables related to each other through the foreign key fields for data link. The greatest benefit of relational database is easy to manage data. The data after normalization can be avoided through the problem of inconsistent data. But the drawback is that data is stored using row-oriented which all rows in a table are the same. When the data is increasing exponentially such as the need to change table structure it takes more time to consume to restructure data. And, the traditional relation database often faces with the need to expand storage space problem. The most often way to solve this problem is to extend the storage space vertically, however, all data stored on a single server will cause a larger workload on the server.

Service Component Architecture for Geographic Information System in Cloud Computing Infrastructure

This paper proposes a service integration model of service component architecture (SCA) that follows Service Oriented Architecture principles applied in services of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS integrates the different types of data to bring a broader, more comprehensive view to decision makers. We have successfully integrated SCA in the domain of vending machines in the past. Readily, we focus on using this architecture to integrate related services of GIS, substantially reduce the duplication of development, publish service of disaster reduction quickly, and provide users with a completely new experiential usage in GIS domain. Meanwhile, we also address many components that can be integrated with system scaling up in GIS, such as environmental monitoring, remote-sensing images processing, Map services, location-based services, and so on. Therefore, we use cloud computing to solve these discussed issues. Finally, this paper implements a SCA-based Rainfall Information Application that composes web service from third party, employs GIS interpolation computation by IDW, and runs the cloud-based service by MapReduce programming model easily. The results of this study can increase development speed, reduce unnecessary work and time consuming, and make the system more stable and scalable in GIS.

Design and Implementation of Virtual Environments for Planning and Building Sustainable Railway Transit Systems

This paper explores the application of virtual reality techniques to rail transit systems from the design and training perspective. This paper presents virtual environments for interactive 3D visualization of a rail transit station. It also describes the design and implementation of some 3D models, which offer a good level of user-interaction and animation within a common rail transit system. The virtual environments for interactive 3D visualization are modeled using Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), a web standard for creating virtual worlds. Two basic categories of models are discussed in the paper. The static 3D models, which are used for planning and design purposes, are based on the object-oriented approach. The dynamic models, which are used for simulation and driver-training purposes, are based on the event-driven approach. Even though a standalone VR application is not capable of a higher level of interaction or animation, using SCRIPT nodes, JavaScript can be embedded in the program to provide additional functionalities. JavaScripting can be used ingeniously to manipulate and control some of the key animation and interpolation nodes to provide powerful functionalities within the VR world. This paper integrates the script programming language with virtual reality and elucidates simulations that can be employed for driver training purposes. By employing these visualization and simulation techniques, designers, engineers, planners, and decision-makers can assess the plan beforehand. The virtual worlds serve as immensely useful tools during the design process by helping the designers to position themselves in photo-realistic 3D immersive environments wherefrom the actual scenario can be viewed and modifications made accordingly.