In the last years, Geographic Information technologies have reached a mature state, providing a platform to support interoperability among different providers and users through Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). However, Civil Protection applications have specific requirements that make them different from typical Earth System Sciences research applications. Currently SDIs and the ESDI (European Spatial Data Infrastructure) only partially address user needs as they offer no or very limited time variable management.The main objective of the work presented here, which presents the achievements of the EU project BRISEIDE, was to develop a complete software architecture in that could provide the user with the possibility to interact with geographic spatio-temporal information through a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The challenge is to define a complex architecture, which is able to provide several kinds of geographic services (images, multidimensional raster data, sensor information, features and processing features) in a unique 2D/3D environment allowing the user to easily interact with the web services and functions. The deployed services enable sharing of geospatial information even with temporal dimension, a fundamental requirement for Civil Protection applications. The services are accessible through a multi-platform 3D client, developed during the project, which also allows interactive orchestration of spatiotemporal WPSs (Web Processing Services) by providing support to chaining of required processing units.
Nowadays is extremely important to monitor and analyze the urban environment and in particular the urban viability. The increasing availability of computational power, together with more efficient simulation algorithm allows real time modeling of even complex systems such as urban traffic. Information and simulation are at the basis of the decisional process for policy makers at global and local level. In this context, visualization tools are useful aids where the understanding of a simulated phenomenon is quite difficult. In recent years, microscopic traffic simulations have become an increasingly active field of research in transport engineering. However the main challenge of these systems is related to the high 'learning curve' and to the complex interface of the analysis tools. Often these models are used by final users that have specific competences to evaluate the phenomena and take appropriate decision. However, often these tools lack in usability and visualization makes it difficult to extract useful information. To face this problem it is important to develop a visual-analytic tool with easily readable results for users with different backgrounds, in order to catch the important information in short time.In this paper we present a highly interactive visual analytics system that helps urban planners, decision makers and traffic analysts simulate and analyze the urban scenario related to the urban viability. The design of the interface has not been based on traditional pull-down menus, panels or buttons that can take the user outside of the frame of the task. The interaction is ensured through direct actions with the 3d context in order to make the operations intuitive and easy to perform. In this way the user is cognitively focused during the problem solving. The user can interact with the 3d environment through graphical metaphors that reduce considerably the time needed to set the parameters for the simulation as well as the time needed to analyze the results. In this paper we focus on the design of the interface and on the visual analysis of the simulation model.
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