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Purpose: The achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for all communities and jurisdictions require a comprehensive roadmap that encompasses all dimensions of data infrastructure, social, economic, environmental and governance ecosystems. With this in mind, this paper aims to establish the link between the curriculum and intended learning outcomes of undergraduate and postgraduate subjects offered by the University and sustainability. This study is a part of a wider university strategy to embed sustainability knowledge and values in the university curricula. The 17 SDGs developed as a part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainability Development was used as tool to measure and map how the subjects are linked with sustainability. Design/methodology/approach: To incorporate sustainability into the curriculum, this paper developed an interdisciplinary approach for analysing the interconnection between the SDGs, the expected subject learning points and the relevant aspects of sustainability (geospatial information, the legal, policies and institutional components). As part of the approach, in the first phase of the study, qualitative data were collected through a review of published information on the SDGs and the content of the subjects available in the subject handbook. Subject codes were assigned to the keywords and key phrases extracted from the SDGs and the subject content, and then compared and matched to establish the link between the subjects and the SDGs. Six university schools offering over 2,157 subjects were investigated. In the second phase, a survey was conducted involving subject coordinators with the purpose of validating the findings of the first phase and determining the strength of the linkages between the subjects and the SDGs. In the third phase, a plugin was designed to be used in the digital twin platform developed in the UoM, allowing visualisation of the research outcomes. Findings: Based on the interim findings, it was found that some subjects within the schools are linked to more than one SDG. However, not all of the subjects within the schools can be linked to the SDGs. There is a scope of improvement for embedding sustainability in more subjects within the schools. Some of the schools were also found to have weak linkages with sustainability, which demonstrate the challenge in technical subjects in linking their subject contents with sustainability. Originality/value: This study provides a methodology which enables the integration of sustainability into current state of the curricula at the university to be established. Further, with the advancement of geospatial technology and new visualisation opportunities through the use of the digital twin platform provides capabilities to communicate the outcomes of sustainability and involvement of each faculties and departments more effectively to the university community and wider stakeholders.

In the past decade, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has emerged as a new source of geographic information, making it a cheap and universal competitor to existing authoritative data sources. The growing popularity of VGI platforms, such as OpenStreetMap (OSM), would trigger malicious activities such as vandalism or spam. Similarly, wrong entries by unexperienced contributors adds to the complexities and directly impact the reliability of such databases. While there are some existing methods and tools for monitoring OSM data quality, there is still a lack of advanced mechanisms for automatic validation. This paper presents a new recommender tool which evaluates the positional plausibility of incoming POI registrations in OSM by generating near real-time validation scores. Similar to machine learning techniques, the tool discovers, stores and reapplies binary distance-based coexistence patterns between one specific POI and its surrounding objects. To clarify the idea, basic concepts about analysing coexistence patterns including design methodology and algorithms are covered in this context. Furthermore, the results of two case studies are presented to demonstrate the analytical power and reliability of the proposed technique. The encouraging results of this new recommendation tool elevates the need for developing reliable quality assurance systems in OSM and other VGI projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three-dimensional (3D) spatial information models are increasingly being adopted to help communicate the spatial dimensions of complex built environments. Land administration practices in multi-owned developments include the subdivision, registration and management of legal interests associated with private, communal and public properties, which are often located along the vertical dimension. The spatial structure of each legal interest is normally composed of invisible spaces, defined as the inside and outside of multi-owned developments, as well as physically built structures. Additionally, a wide variety of legal boundary types mark out the spatial limits of the individual parts of each legal interest. These legal boundaries are typically delineated by either relying on fixed surveying measurements or referencing physically existent objects. This article provides a critical assessment of 3D spatial information models in terms of their capabilities for modelling legal interests and legal boundaries defined in the Victorian jurisdiction. We classify these models into three categories: purely legal, purely physical and integrated. This assessment provides the basis for developing a new 3D spatial information model, which would subsequently support a pathway towards realising the Victorian land administration system in a 3D digital environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Every year, about 1.24 million people are killed in traffic crashes worldwide and more than 22% of these deaths are pedestrians. Therefore, pedestrian safety has become a significant traffic safety issue worldwide. In order to develop effective and targeted safety programs, the location- and time-specific influences on vehicle-pedestrian crashes must be assessed. The main purpose of this research is to explore the influence of pedestrian age and gender on the temporal and spatial distribution of vehicle-pedestrian crashes to identify the hotspots and hot times.Methods: Data for all vehicle-pedestrian crashes on public roadways in the Melbourne metropolitan area from 2004 to 2013 are used in this research. Spatial autocorrelation is applied in examining the vehicle-pedestrian crashes in geographic information systems (GIS) to identify any dependency between time and location of these crashes. Spider plots and kernel density estimation (KDE) are then used to determine the temporal and spatial patterns of vehicle-pedestrian crashes for different age groups and genders.Results: Temporal analysis shows that pedestrian age has a significant influence on the temporal distribution of vehicle-pedestrian crashes. Furthermore, men and women have different crash patterns. In addition, results of the spatial analysis shows that areas with high risk of vehicle-pedestrian crashes can vary during different times of the day for different age groups and genders. For example, for those between ages 18 and 65, most vehicle-pedestrian crashes occur in the central business district (CBD) during the day, but between 7:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., crashes among this age group occur mostly around hotels, clubs, and bars.Conclusions: This research reveals that temporal and spatial distributions of vehicle-pedestrian crashes vary for different pedestrian age groups and genders. Therefore, specific safety measures should be in place during high crash times at different locations for different age groups and genders to increase the effectiveness of the countermeasures in preventing and reducing vehicle-pedestrian crashes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multistorey buildings typically include stratified legal interests which provide entitlements to a community of owners to lawfully possess private properties and use communal and public properties. The spatial arrangements of these legal interests are often defined by multiplexing cognitively outlined spaces and physical elements of a building. In order to support 3D digital management and communication of legal arrangements of properties, a number of spatial data models have been recently developed in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Building Information Modelling (BIM) domains. While some data models, such as CityGML, IndoorGML or IFC, provide a merely physical representation of the built environment, others, e.g., LADM, mainly rely on legal data elements to support a purely legal view of multistorey buildings. More recently, spatial data models integrating legal and physical notions of multistorey buildings have been proposed to overcome issues associated with purely legal models and purely physical ones. In previous investigations, it has been found that the 3D digital data environment of BIM has the flexibility to utilize either only physical elements or only legal spaces, or an integrated view of both legal spaces and physical elements to represent spatial arrangements of stratified legal interests. In this article, the performance of these three distinct BIM-based representations of legal interests defined inside multistorey buildings is assessed in the context of the Victorian jurisdiction of Australia. The assessment metrics are a number of objects and geometry batches, visualization speed in terms of frame rate, query time, modelling legal boundaries, and visual communication of legal boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land administration systems assist citizens in identifying their rights, restrictions and responsibilities (RRRs) associated with land and property. However, delineating the spatial extent of all RRRs regulated in legislation remains a challenge. Approaches that have been used so far are mainly based on accurate surveying processes, which are untimely and too expensive. Previous studies proposed Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) as a practical and low-cost method for fast acquisition of spatial data from volunteered contributions, mostly for countries where a limited number of land rights records exist. However, VGI could be beneficial for advanced and developing land administration systems in terms of collecting a range of RRRs which are not spatially well recorded and represented. A multidisciplinary review of the literature on VGI and land administration reveals the lack of a comprehensive conceptual framework for utilising VGI in land administration for the purpose of collecting a range of RRRs related to land and property. This paper investigates the main aspects of utilising VGI in land administration based on qualitative content analysis of available resources. The outcome of this research suggests that using VGI in land administration requires a comprehensive understanding of the complexities and interconnections of legal, institutional, technical and social aspects within each jurisdiction. These findings are merged to formulate a generic and innovative conceptual framework which serves as a basis for the process of collecting land and property RRRs from volunteer contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flood damage assessment (FDA) provides an effective basis for the flood risk management process to evaluate and treat risks. Current FDA methods, however, are ill-equipped to account for the distinctiveness of buildings in the analysis. This is mainly due to their limited input data that on the one hand requires complete building information (well-represented in building information models [BIM]) and, on the other hand, the flood information (commonly managed by geographic information systems [GIS]). While such requirements cannot be satisfied via independent use of BIM or GIS, their integration can potentially be used for this purpose. The current BIM-GIS integration methods, however, are limited or application-specific. Therefore they fall short in satisfying the micro-level FDA information requirements. This paper presents a new data model as a profile of Geography Markup Language (GML) for BIM-GIS integration to support the detailed assessment and 3D visualisation of flood damage to buildings. The model was further evaluated using a case study and found effective for this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing size and complexity of indoor structures and increased urbanization has led to much more complication in urban disaster management. Contrary to outdoor environments, first responders and planners have limited information regarding the indoor areas in terms of architectural and semantic information as well as how they interact with their surroundings in case of indoor disasters. Availability of such information could help decision makers interact with building information and thus make more efficient planning prior to entering the disaster site. In addition as the indoor travel times required to reach specific areas in the building could be much longer compared to outdoor, visualizing the exact location of building rooms and utilities in 3D helps in visually communicating the indoor spatial information which could eventually result in decreased routing uncertainty inside the structures and help in more informed navigation strategies. This work aims at overcoming the insufficiencies of existing indoor modelling approaches by proposing a new Indoor Emergency Spatial Model (IESM) based on IFC. The model integrates 3D indoor architectural and semantic information required by first responders during indoor disasters with outdoor geographical information to improve situational awareness about both interiors of buildings as well as their interactions with outdoor components. The model is implemented and tested using the Esri GIS platform. The paper discusses the effectiveness of the model in both decision making and navigation by demonstrating the model's indoor spatial analysis capabilities and how it improves destination travel times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By increasing the popularity of smart phones equipped with GPS sensors, more volunteers are expected to join VGI (Volunteered Geographic Information) activities and therefore more positional data will be collected in shorter time. Current statistics from open databases such OpenStreetMap reveals that although there have been exponential growth in the number of contributed POIs (Points of Interest), the lack of detailed attribute information is immediately visible. The process of adding attribute information to VGI databases is usually considered as a boring task and it is believed that contributors do not experience a similar level of satisfaction when they add such detailed information compared to tasks like adding new roads or copying building boundaries from satellite imageries. In other crowdsourcing projects, different approaches are taken for engaging contributors in problem solving by embedding the tasks inside a game. In the literature, this concept is known as "gamification" or "games with purpose" which encapsulate the idea of entertaining contributors while they are completing a particular defined task. Same concept is used to design a mobile application called "RoadPlex" which aims to collect general or specific attribute information for POIs. The increased number of contributions in the past few months confirms that the design characteristics and the methodology of the game are appealing to players. Such growth enables us to evaluate the quality of the generated data through mining the database of answered questions. This paper reflects the some contribution results and emphasises the importance of using gamification concept in the domain of VGI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been greater tendency towards embracing the potential of the Web 2.0 in knowledge creation with user contributions becoming significantly important in the development of open data such as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). An increasing number of volunteers which add value to geospatial data require effective ways of organising and providing access to value-added or newly created data. Metadata records are often unavailable for VGI, making it problematic for users to discover data in the VGI system. This paper discusses potential approaches that can be used to create metadata for VGI. This includes Linked Data, professionally created metadata and metadata created by volunteers. The paper then discusses the shortcomings of these approaches and proposes an unconventional alternative, Geospatial Metadata 2.0. This approach involves VGI users in the creation of metadata, and builds on folksonomies created by them. The paper presents the design and implementation of this idea in a prototype system along with an assessment result. The implementation includes Geospatial Metadata 2.0 add-ons in Geonetwork, and the assessment benefits from the input of metadata experts worldwide. The assessment of the benefits results indicate such an approach of metadata creation is promising and has the potential to be employed in VGI systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of multisource heterogeneous spatial data is one of the major challenges for many spatial data users. To facilitate multisource spatial data integration, many initiatives including federated databases, feature manipulation engines (FMEs), ontology-driven data integration and spatial mediators have been proposed. The major aim of these initiatives is to harmonize data sets and establish interoperability between different data sources. On the contrary, spatial data integration and interoperability is not a pure technical exercise, and there are other nontechnical issues including institutional, policy, legal and social issues involved. Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) framework aims to better address the technical and nontechnical issues and facilitate data integration. The SDIs aim to provide a holistic platform for users to interact with spatial data through technical and nontechnical tools. This article aims to discuss the complexity of the challenges associated with data integration and propose a tool that facilitates data harmonization through the assessment of multisource spatial data sets against many measures. The measures represent harmonization criteria and are defined based on the requirement of the respective jurisdiction. Information on technical and nontechnical characteristics of spatial data sets is extracted to form metadata and actual data. Then the tool evaluates the characteristics against measures and identifies the items of inconsistency. The tool also proposes available manipulation tools or guidelines to overcome inconsistencies among data sets. The tool can assist practitioners and organizations to avoid the time-consuming and costly process of validating data sets for effective data integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Commission on Spatial Data Standards of the International Cartographic Association is working to define formal models and technical characteristics of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). To date, this work has been restricted to the Enterprise and Information Viewpoints from the ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing standard. The Commission has developed models for these two viewpoints. These models describe how the different parts of an SDI fit together in the viewpoints in question. These models should be seen as a contribution towards the overall model of the SDI and its technical characteristics. During the model development process, the roles of the different Actors in an SDI in the Enterprise and Information Viewpoints have also been identified in Use Case diagrams of an SDI. All the models have been developed using the Unified Modeling Language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Service-oriented architecture in a distributed computing environment, with loosely coupled geo-services is a new approach for using GIS services in environmental modeling. The messages exchanged must follow a set of standard protocols which support syntactic interoperability, but do not address application semantics. This article proposes a layer-based ontology with additional layers for describing geo-services, especially the measurement units used. The paper gives an ontology of measurements for describing the input and output of field-based geo-services and a core ontology of geo-services containing the domain concepts. An upper ontology adds new general concepts to an existing ontology in order to achieve an agreement between geo-service developers and environmental modelers. The layer-based structure is the building block for discovering geo-services that support semantic interoperability in GIS and environmental modeling. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The 3D Tiles specification, created by Cesium, is designed for streaming massive heterogeneous three-dimensional (3D) geospatial datasets online using WebGL technology. The program has prevailed in the WebGIS community due to its ability to visualise, interact, and style 3D objects for various scenarios, such as 3D cities, indoor environments, and point clouds. It offers a new opportunity to integrate Building Information Models (BIM) in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) data format with existing geospatial data in a 3D WebGIS platform with open-source implementation. As no open-source solution for converting IFC models into 3D Tiles for online visualization had yet been found, this paper explores feasible approaches and integrates a range of tools and libraries as an open-source solution for the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having access to real-time spatial information is central to the functioning of disaster management, and in particular disaster response. Existing spatially-enabled solutions for managing urban disasters provide limited support for time-sensitivity and urgency underlying emergency situations. These approaches mainly suffer from low temporal resolution and inability to source a broad range of required disaster data, together with insufficient support for automated operations. However, disaster management procedures, integrated with in situ sensing, promise an extensive range of real-time data and automated processes to acquire and manage disaster information. In this research, we study the process of integrating multi-agency in situ sensors for supporting disaster management. For this purpose, the research was adopted in Australia as the case study area in disaster management of a flood by emphasizing on the response phase. This paper first identifies the issues and existing requirements in the process of multi-agency sensor information integration and then proposes a standard-based approach to overcoming these integration issues. Afterward, based on the presented approach and identified requirements, a GIS-based software IDDSS-Sensor is implemented to provide the functions of standard-based access, as well as on-the-fly harmonization, integration and usage of multi-agency sensor information. We evaluate the applicability of our developed approach by applying it to the use case of supporting flash flood evacuation response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has been widely adopted to assist in disaster management, yet its characteristics of uncertainty and requirements of large amounts of manual manipulation for data validation and interpretation hinder VGI applications. In this study, we aimed to develop an effective method to assess the credibility of VGI for time-critical conditions, such as disaster response. We collected datasets from two extreme flood events in 2011 and 2013 from Brisbane, Australia. According to the defined geo-location factors, we built a binary logistic regression with the 2011 event dataset to measure the credibility scores of the VGI instances. At the threshold of 0.917, the overall accuracy of the model in the 2011 training dataset was 90.5%. Next, the performance of this probability model was evaluated by the 2013 testing instances. We found that our model could categorize the credibility classes with 80.4% accuracy. These results suggest great potential for our model to be used by emergency management sectors to sort credibility of VGI for efficient and rapid response, decision-making, and coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]