No abstract

Intensive farming on land represents an increased burden on the environment due to, among other reasons, the usage of agrochemicals. Precision farming can reduce the environmental burden by employing site specific crop management practices which implement advanced geospatial technologies for respecting soil heterogeneity. The objectives of this paper are to present the frontier approaches of geospatial (Big) data processing based on satellite and sensor data which both aim at the prevention and mitigation phases of disaster risk reduction in agriculture. Three techniques are presented in order to demonstrate the possibilities of geospatial (Big) data collection in agriculture: (1) farm machinery telemetry for providing data about machinery operations on fields through the developed MapLogAgri application; (2) agrometeorological observation in the form of a wireless sensor network together with the SensLog solution for storing, analysing, and publishing sensor data; and (3) remote sensing for monitoring field spatial variability and crop status by means of freely-available high resolution satellite imagery. The benefits of re-using the techniques in disaster risk reduction processes are discussed. The conducted tests demonstrated the transferability of agricultural techniques to crisis/emergency management domains.

Both agricultural and environmental domains have to manage many different and heterogeneous sources of information that need to be combined in order to make environmentally and economically sound decisions. Such examples may be found at the definition of subsidies, national strategies for rural development, development of sustainable agriculture etc. This paper describes in detail the development of an open data model for (precision) agriculture applications and agricultural pollution monitoring when aiming at identification of requirements from users from agricultural and environmental domains. The presented open data model for (precision) agriculture applications and agricultural pollution monitoring has been registered under the GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) Architecture Implementation Pilot-Phase 8 in order to support the wide variety of demands that are primary aimed at agriculture and water pollution monitoring.

Big data have also become a big challenge for cartographers, as the majority of big data may be localized. The use of visual analytics tools, as well as comprising interactive maps, stimulates inter-disciplinary actors to explore new ideas and decision-making methods. This paper deals with the evaluation of three map-based visual analytics tools by means of the eye-tracking method. The conceptual part of the paper begins with an analysis of the state-of-the-art and ends with the design of proof-of-concept experiments. The verification part consists of the design, composition, and realization of the conducted eye-tracking experiment, in which three map-based visual analytics tools were tested in terms of user-friendliness. A set of recommendations on GUI (graphical user interface) design and interactive functionality for map makers is formulated on the basis of the discovered errors and shortcomings in the assessed stimuli. The results of the verification were used as inputs for improving the three tested map-based visual analytics tools and might serve as a best practice for map-based visual analytics tools in general, as well as for improving the policy making cycle as elaborated by the European project PoliVisu (Policy Development based on Advanced Geospatial Data Analytics and Visualization).

The resources of the enviroGRIDS system are accessible to the large community of users through the BSC-OS Portal that provides Web applications for data management, hydrological model calibration and execution, satellite image processing, report generation and visualization, citizens oriented applications, and virtual training center. The portal publishes through Internet both the geospatial functionality provided by Web technologies, and the high power computation resources supported by the Grid technologies. The paper highlights the issues on the implementation of the portal by heterogeneous technologies, in order to support control flow, processing, and visualization of spatial data for GEOSS community, Earth Science specialists, and generally for Web users.

Rural areas in Europe are at risk due to depopulation, failing generation renewal, and a multitude of influences ranging from market-based, regulatory, to societal and climate changes. As a result, current rural policy is no longer keeping pace with these changes. We propose an advanced rural policy development framework in order to deliver more accurate foresight for rural regions, contributing to new and enhanced policy interventions. The proposed framework combines new quantitative and qualitative epistemological approaches, previously unused unstructured data with traditional research information, grassroot perspective with expert knowledge, current situation analysis with forward looking activities. We argue that by using the proposed methods, policy teams will be able to enhance the effectiveness of their policy making processes, while rural stakeholders will be given the opportunity to become valuable policy influencers and solution co-creators. The ability to quickly experiment and understand the impact of a variety of policy solutions will result in saved time and costs. The framework is part of an ongoing experimental verification and testing in twelve pilot regions across Europe and Israel.

Abstract-Spatial data represent valuable information and a basis for decision making processes in society. The number of specialisms that use spatial data for such purposes is increasing. Increasing is also the number of services enabling to search, access, process, analyse or visualise spatial data. Standardisation activities of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) support standardised sharing of services through the Web. However, many services declared as OGC compliant do not respond or they are not available. The paper introduces an innovative solution for efficient discovery of and access to spatial data services compliant with OGC specifications. The research was performed in the context of the EnviroGRIDS geoportal. Several thousands of harvested services were quality checked and the summary of the testing including the identified problems are presented.

Precision farming is a very fast developing form of the Farm Management System, especially in crop production, in whole world and in our country as well. There, it is adopted since the second half of the 90s of the 20th century. The system of data collection, analysis, presentation and application of information in precision farming is reaching over the possibilities of their use by common farmers or agricultural companies. Service companies in this case play a very important role as an executor of exacting analysis, data collection and their presentation. Management zones present simplification of the difficult operations and recommendations including economic calculations for the common user involved in the precision farming management.