The increasing availability of information about earth surface elevation (Digital Elevation Models DEM) generated from different sources (remote sensing, Aerial Images, Lidar) poses the question about how to integrate and make available to the most than possible audience this huge amount of data. In order to exploit the potential of 3D elevation representation the quality of data management plays a fundamental role. Due to the high acquisition costs and the huge amount of generated data, highresolution terrain surveys tend to be small or medium sized and available on limited portion of earth. Here comes the need to merge large-scale height maps that typically are made available for free at worldwide level, with very specific high resolute datasets. One the other hand, the third dimension increases the user experience and the data representation quality, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis for civil protection, real estate, urban planning, environment monitoring, etc. The open-source 3D virtual globes, which are trending topics in Geovisual Analytics, aim at improving the visualization of geographical data provided by standard web services or with proprietary formats. Typically, 3D Virtual globes like do not offer an open-source tool that allows the generation of a terrain elevation data structure starting from heterogeneous-resolution terrain datasets. This paper describes a technological solution aimed to set up a so-called “Terrain Builder”. This tool is able to merge heterogeneous-resolution datasets, and to provide a multi-resolution worldwide terrain services fully compatible with CesiumJS and therefore accessible via web using traditional browser without any additional plug-in. Keywords—Terrain builder, WebGL, virtual globe, CesiumJS, tiled map service, TMS, height-map, regular grid, Geovisual analytics, DTM.

Forests represent an important economic resource for mountainous areas being for a few region and mountain communities the main form of income. However, wood chain management in these contexts differs from the traditional schemes due to the limits imposed by terrain morphology, both for the operation planning aspects and the hardware requirements. In fact, forest organizational and technical problems require a wider strategic and detailed level of planning to reach the level of productivity of forest operation techniques applied on flatlands.In particular, a perfect knowledge of forest inventories improves long-term management sustainability and efficiency allowing a better understanding of forest ecosystems. However, this knowledge is usually based on historical parcel information with only few cases of remote sensing information from satellite imageries. This is not enough to fully exploit the benefit of the mountain areas forest stocks where the economic and ecological value of each single parcel depends on singletree characteristics.The work presented in this paper, based on the results of the SLOPE (Integrated proceSsing and controL systems fOr sustainable forest Production in mountain arEas) project, investigates the capability to generate, manage and visualize detailed virtual forest models using geospatial information, combining data acquired from traditional on-the-field laser scanning surveys technologies with new aerial survey through UAV systems. These models are then combined with interactive 3D virtual globes for continuous assessment of resource characteristics, harvesting planning and real-time monitoring of the whole production.

This paper illustrates the preliminary results of a research project focused on the development of a Web 2.0 system designed to compute and visualize large-scale building energy performance maps, using: emerging platform-independent technologies such as WebGL for data presentation, an extended version of the EU-Founded project TABULA/EPISCOPE for automatic calculation of building energy parameters and CityGML OGC standard as data container. The proposed architecture will allow citizens, public administrations and government agencies to perform city-wide analyses on the energy performance of building stocks.

At the present, we are in the midst of another major societal shift that is leading to a hyper-connected society. In this hyper-connected society, the convergence of mobile technology, online access and global media is connecting masses of people without precedents, with resulting impacts on communication, content creation and social engagement. Online presence and interactive mobile services are, therefore, become a key strategy for entities that seek to increase user engagement and awareness. In this paper, we introduce an interoperable framework for the visualisation and processing of 3D city models on mobile devices. Our solution crystallises on CityGML's ability to store and describe 3D city-related geometry along with its semantics, which is fundamental to city level operations like validity checking, automatic integration, thematic queries, and spatial data mining. The streaming of 3D models is transparent to the user, who perceives remote models as locally stored. The user interface is designed for 3D data exploration and analysis on mobile environments, and it is fully compliant with OGC open web standards.

Forests represent an important economic resource for mountainous areas being for a few region and mountain communities the main form of income. In latest years, the advancements in mechanization, automation and ICT contributed to the evolution of forestry industry and productivity especially with cut-to-length system. This innovation has mainly interested forestry in flatland areas excluding mountains where terrain morphology, poor road network and limited space for storage or operations, pose a series of organizational and technical problems for forest harvesting. Planning is relatively poor due to the reduced mobility and productivity of the machines deployed up to recent years, while a wider strategic and detailed level of planning would be crucial to reach the forest operation techniques applied on flatlands.This document presents an integrated forest information system (FIS) developed in the context of the SLOPE project (Integrated proceSsing and controL systems fOr sustainable forest Production in mountain arEas), for the optimization of forest production in mountainous area. Thanks to a semi-automatic three-dimensional reconstruction of the forest model, this system constitutes an accurate tool for forestry planning that combines multi-scale geographical information of terrain and vegetation, real-time information coming from machineries involved in forest harvesting and logistic models to increase the planning efficiency in mountainous areas.The SLOPE System represents a novel approach to the wood harvesting in mountainous scenarios, combining forest geographic data, going from wide area spatial information to single tree details, within a three-dimensional virtual globe and a structural model for continuous and real-time assessment of the resource characteristics.

A key theme in ubiquitous computing is to create easy-to-use smart environments in which there is a seamless integration of people, user experience, information, and physical reality. The next generation of ultra-portable handheld projectors is paving the way in this direction, as it develops to its pinnacle. When coupled with appropriate tracking technologies, this technology can extend user experience beyond the confines of the device itself to encompass the physical properties of environment. In this paper, we introduce a projection-based augmented reality framework that aims at facilitating the creation of augmented environments where digital content is snapped to objects around the user. We extend previous literature with a projection-oriented framework that leverages on handheld projectors to seamless combine physical interactions with projection-based content snapped to real objects, while solving inherent issues related to use of projective technology. To evaluate the relevance and impact of this study, we discuss a few application scenarios that are enabling this interaction paradigm.

This paper illustrates a 3D web-based visual simulation system that supports spatial-information based realistic modelling and real-time rendering of forest scenes. 3D visualization of forest landscapes will be used to understand stand ecological succession, landscape transformation helping regional planning and improving decision-making processes and forest management through what-if analysis tools. The goal of the presented project is to deploy a web system able to easily provide access to forestry information, typically managed in GIS or dedicated system, ensuring the fruition of this information to non-geospatial experts like forest owners and field operators.Technologies such as HTML5, WebGL, CSS 3D and Canvas element have been chosen as the most suitable for the interactive visualization of the forest model placed in the context of a virtual globe representation of the Earth using a highly customized version of the CesiumJS virtual globe, called GeoBrowser3D. Powered by WebGL and state of the art software technologies it offers a three-dimensional Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant solution, integrated with computational and visual techniques for decision making environments. This solution allows large scale GIS data visualization such as maps and forest models, as well as high detail small scale information such as point clouds or stems structures that are automatically generated according to inventory database and pre-designed template models. Additionally, forest activity planners can have access to larger scale datasets like roads and cadastral maps as well as single timber information. The system has been tested and evaluated in applications of walkthrough simulation and forest visualization. The test site is situated in Northern Italy, close to Sover in the Trentino region.

Forest wood harvesting in mountain areas needs a deep and accurate planning to avoid possible failures and criticalities due to the complex morphology of the terrain. Steepness, difficult accessibility and on the field manual work are cost effective factors to reckon, but not always taken into account on all phases, due to the heterogeneity of competences and instruments adopted by the involved actors. Geographical information systems planning tools, demonstrated their usefulness to analyze spatial data in such conditions, but their specificity makes their adoption difficult among operators especially in a conservative industry like forestry. This document introduces an interactive web 3D planning tool based on an accurate virtual forest environment reconstruction, to support the entire wood processing chain in mountain areas, from tree marking to timber production within sawmills, accommodating the needs of all the involved actors bringing novel simulation, planning and monitoring tools at their disposal.

Nowadays, rapid technological development into acquiring geo-spatial information; joined to the capabilities to process these data in a relative short period of time, allows the generation of detailed 3D textured city models that will become an essential part of the modern city information infrastructure (Spatial Data Infrastructure) and, can be used to integrate various data from different sources for public accessible visualisation and many other applications. One of the main bottlenecks, which at the moment limit the use of these datasets to few experts, is a lack on efficient visualization systems through the web and interoperable frameworks that allow standardising the access to the city models. The work presented in this paper tries to satisfy these two requirements developing a 3D web-based visualization system based on OGC standards and effective visualization concepts. The architectural framework, based on Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts, provides the 3D city data to a web client designed to support the view process in a very effective way. The first part of the work is to design a framework compliant to the 3D Portrayal Service drafted by the of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) 3D standardization working group. The latter is related to the development of an effective web client able to render in an efficient way the 3D city models.

The project SLOPE will integrate information from, UAV and on-field surveying systems, to support macro and local analysis to characterize the forest resources. Spatial information will integrate data in a model for optimization of logistics during forest operations.

One of the main topics of cities is mobility. Nowadays, Mobile phones can provide navigation instructions in real-time, accessing wireless the Internet so routing and navigation applications on the Internet, in cars or on personal smartphones are everyday tools for many people. The purpose of iSCOPE project was to deploy, based on new generation urban city model, a set of services to support the improvement of life quality on urban areas. One of these services was a personalized routing service for disabled people. Pedestrians need a specific set of features to represent the environment and other information including barriers, sidewalks accessibility along the way, points of interest, and even services for disabled people. Unfortunately commercial geodata providers do not offer this detailed information; therefore there is a lack on this data from digital city maps, yellow pages and travel information data sets. This paper will explore the potential for the VGI community to improve data access and services in the field of disable pedestrian mobility computing. This allows collecting information about a network to be used in routeplanning, real-time navigation or for both, by providing detailed information about the “best” individual route based on the user’s limitations.

This paper illustrates the preliminary results of a research project focused on the development of a Web 2.0 system designed to compute and visualize large-scale building energy performance maps, so called â ecomapsâ , using emerging platform-independent technologies such as WebGL for data presentation, an extended version of the EU-Founded project TABULA/EPISCOPE for automatic calculation of building energy parameters and CityGML OGC standard as data container. The proposed architecture will allow citizens, public administrations and government agencies to perform city-wide analyses on the energy performance of building stocks.

In this paper we describe the potential for using the Volunteered Geographic Information VGI, and large crowd-sourced survey, in disable people mobility computing applications The challenge is to make these two concepts talking together exploiting the technologies in order to increase the public participation, and to move towards sustainable development. Our goal is to investigate how participative and people-centric data collection can be used to create a low-cost, open platform to survey, annotate and localise pedestrian mobility features and architectural barriers as it is perceived by the citizen themselves. The core of the project consists into the development and deployment of a mobile application and a web platform, which allow the users to collect and manage the information surveyed.

The rapid technological evolution, which is characterizing all the disciplines involved within the wide concept of smart cities, is becoming a key factor to trigger true user-driven innovation. However to fully develop the Smart City concept to a wide geographical target, it is required an infrastructure that allows the integration of heterogeneous geographical information and sensor networks into a common technological ground. In this context 3D city models will play an increasingly important role in our daily lives and become an essential part of the modern city information infrastructure (Spatial Data Infrastructure). The work presented in this paper describes an innovative Services Oriented Architecture software platform aimed at providing smartcities services on top of 3D urban models. 3D city models are the basis of many applications and can became the platform for integrating city information within the Smart-Cites context. In particular the paper will investigate how the efficient visualisation of 3D city models using different levels of detail (LODs) is one of the pivotal technological challenge to support Smart-Cities applications. The goal is to provide to the final user realistic and abstract 3D representations of the urban environment and the possibility to interact with a massive amounts of semantic information contained into the geospatial 3D city model. The proposed solution, using OCG standards and a custom service to provide 3D city models, lets the users to consume the services and interact with the 3D model via Web in a more effective way.

1 ABSTRACT The i-SCOPE project is based on interoperable 3D Urban Information Models (UIM) and delivers an open platform on top of which it develops, within different domains, three ‘smart city’ services. These will be piloted and validated, within a number of EU cities that will be actively engaged throughout the project lifecycle. The services will address: 1. Improved inclusion and personal mobility of aging and diversely able citizens through an accurate city-level disable-friendly personal routing service that accounts for detailed urban layout, features and barriers. 2. Optimization of energy consumption through a service for accurate assessment of solar energy potential at building level. 3. Environmental monitoring through a real-time environmental noise mapping service, by leveraging citizen’s involvement will who act as distributed sensors city-wide measuring noise levels through their mobile phones. All smart services will be based on already available technologies which will be integrated, deployed and made publicly available from a “3D smart EU cities” portal. The paper explores how the different pilots are being implemented in the various cities and what is the relationship between the public administration and the end users.