Abstract
Abstract. GeoWeb 2.0, laying the foundations of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) systems, has led to platforms where users can contribute to the geographic knowledge that is open to access. Moreover, as a result of the advancements in 3D visualization, virtual globes able to visualize geographic data even on browsers emerged. However the integration of VGI systems and virtual globes has not been fully realized. The study presented aims to visualize volunteered data in 3D, considering also the ease of use aspects for general public, using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The new Application Programming Interface (API) of NASA, Web World Wind, written in JavaScript and based on Web Graphics Library (WebGL) is cross-platform and cross-browser, so that the virtual globe created using this API can be accessible through any WebGL supported browser on different operating systems and devices, as a result not requiring any installation or configuration on the client-side, making the collected data more usable to users, which is not the case with the World Wind for Java as installation and configuration of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is required. Furthermore, the data collected through various VGI platforms might be in different formats, stored in a traditional relational database or in a NoSQL database. The project developed aims to visualize and query data collected through Open Data Kit (ODK) platform and a cross-platform application, where data is stored in a relational PostgreSQL and NoSQL CouchDB databases respectively.
Highlights
Delivering geographic information on Internet started soon after the emergence of World Wide Web in early 1990s with very primitive capabilities (Putz, 1994)
In this system Open Data Kit (ODK) suite is exploited for realization of a Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) platform, that allows users to report Points of Interest (POIs), using their Android mobile devices
PoliCrowd server is deployed on the GlassFish Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server backed with a PostgreSQL relational database to store all the data related to the platform, such as the users’ credentials, the list of servers that have been used by the users, the list of projects that have been created by the users, along with the projects themselves, and the data uploaded by the users as an update of the POIs displayed on the virtual globe
Summary
Delivering geographic information on Internet started soon after the emergence of World Wide Web in early 1990s with very primitive capabilities (Putz, 1994). On the other hand GeoWeb (or GeoWeb 1.0) is characterized by static 2D map sites, being publishing-oriented, producercentric, centralized, closely coupled and basic (Maguire, 2007). Another new term, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) emerged with the birth of GeoWeb 2.0 and is popularized by Goodchild (2007b). Goodchild argues that humans may act as sensors, build and publish the content themselves, using devices with sensors, for instance mobile devices with GPS receivers. Humans in this scenario may use their camera to geo-tag multimedia content and Internet connection to publish them. This study focuses on realizing this kind of platform in the most usable way possible
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