In this paper we present a web-based platform that makes use of HTML5 technology and WebGL to facilitate public participation in urban planning. It consists of components that enable city administrations to present urban plans to the public and to engage with stakeholders. One of these components uses the open source library X3DOM to visualise 3D content-for example, a city model containing a 3D representation of a planned building. Since X3DOM does not need additional software to be installed on the user's system our implementation is more portable than previous work. Our solution is based on the open source software Liferay which allows it to be configured for various urban planning projects. In order to enable communication between different web application components residing in inline frames (iframes) we implemented a special message bus based on HTML5 postMessage. In this paper we describe implementation details, but we also intensively discuss the possibilities of modern web technology for urban planning. We motivate the use of such technology through three examples that can be implemented using our web application. In this paper we also present results from evaluating our application in user workshops carried out within the project urbanAPI that is funded by the European Commission. Finally, we draw conclusions and discuss possibilities for future urban planning use cases
Today’s politicians are confronted with new information technologies to\ud
tackle complex decision-making problems. In order to make sustainable decisions,\ud
a profound analysis of societal problems and possible solutions (policy options)\ud
needs to be performed. In this policy-analysis process, different stakeholders are\ud
involved. Besides internal direct advisors of the policy makers (policy analysts),\ud
external experts from different scientific disciplines can support evidence-based decision making. Despite the alleged importance of scientific advice in the policy-making\ud
process, it is observed that scientific results are often not used. In this work, a concept\ud
is described that supports the collaboration between scientists and politicians. We propose a science–policy interface that is realized by including information visualization in the policy-analysis process. Therefore, we identify synergy effects between\ud
both fields and introduce a methodology for addressing the current challenges of\ud
science–policy interfaces with visualization. Finally, we describe three exemplary\ud
case studies carried out in European research projects that instantiate the concept of\ud
this approach
We evaluate three Open-Source WebGL frameworks (X3DOM, three. js and Cesium) and investigate their use for geospatial applications in the Web. Over the course of one year we carried out five case studies and developed different software prototypes using these frameworks. We focus on geospatial applications since they require unique features that bring the evaluated WebGL frameworks to their limits. Geospatial data is typically heterogeneous and very large. Geospatial applications require special data management and interaction techniques. We describe the criteria that we defined to test the WebGL solutions and present our experience from working with them. We give a qualitative comparison and finish the paper with conclusions and an outlook on future research perspectives
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