Stefan Steiniger - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Stefan Steiniger

Research paper thumbnail of PlanYourPlace: Merging Social Networks and Participatory GIS for Participatory Planning

The planning and execution of urban development projects should involve citizen participation. Ci... more The planning and execution of urban development projects should involve citizen participation. Citizen participation is essential if the needs of the population are to be addressed when undertaking public development projects, and participation is essential if private construction projects are to be accepted by the residents that live adjacent to and within such projects. As a new -complementary -form of citizen engagement the planning and participatory Geographic Information Systems (GIS) literature proposes the use of Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate engagement with a broader range of citizens. The PlanYourPlace project was established to develop such a participatory planning platform for communities within and surrounding the City of Calgary. In particular the platform should enable citizens to voice their opinions, and facilitate discussion of urban development scenarios between citizenry, city planners, and decision makers. Social networks provide functions that allow participants to inform, discuss, vote and share, whereas GIS provides functions for creating plans and performing impact assessments. Hence, the proposed planning platform merges social networking with GIS. In this article we outline what functionality the participatory planning platform should provide, and discuss constraints that emerge when considering the platform user, the intended user activities, the context of use, and access to data. We will then present a technical architecture for the web platform that can address these constraints. Subsequently we report on the current state of implementation and outline challenges for future work.

Research paper thumbnail of Recognition of Large Island Structures for Map Gen eralization

Research paper thumbnail of GIS Software - A description in 1000 words

Software that is used to create, manage, analyze and visualize geographic data, i.e. data with a ... more Software that is used to create, manage, analyze and visualize geographic data, i.e. data with a reference to a place on earth, is usually denoted by the umbrella term 'GIS software'. Typical applications for GIS software include the evaluation of places for the location of new stores, the management of power and gas lines, the creation of maps, the analysis of past crimes for crime prevention, route calculations for transport tasks, the management of forests, parks and infrastructure, such as roads and water ways, as well as applications in risk analysis of natural hazards, and emergency planning and response. For this multitude of applications different types of

Research paper thumbnail of USAGE OF PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS IN THE PROCESS OF AUTOMATED GENERALISATION

Current generalisation approaches use cartographic constraints for the situation analysis and eva... more Current generalisation approaches use cartographic constraints for the situation analysis and evaluation, as well as the selection of generalisation operators. Despite the importance of the constraints for the whole generalisation process, little research has been done about relationships between constraints and their interdependencies. The aim of this paper is the investigation of such relationships with help of Principal Component Analysis

Research paper thumbnail of A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR AUTOMATED GENERALIZATION AND ITS APPLICATION TO GEOLOGIC AND SOIL MAPS

Independent Component Analysis, 2000

Research in map generalization starts to focus on other types of maps than on topographic maps on... more Research in map generalization starts to focus on other types of maps than on topographic maps only. There- fore, new generalization concepts have to be developed, extending on the experiences and research efforts originally made in topographic generalization. This paper presents a new conceptual framework of map generalization with re- spect to thematic mapping based on an analysis of the

Research paper thumbnail of Relations and Structures in Categorical Maps

Abstract, Focusing on thematic and more specifically, cate-gorical maps, the paper emphasises the... more Abstract, Focusing on thematic and more specifically, cate-gorical maps, the paper emphasises the importance of horizontal relations in automated generalisation. A literature review shows that automated generalisation of thematic maps has not received ample attention. It shows further that the extraction and use of relations in topographic maps for generalisation purposes is making progress, but no systematic categorisation for relations

Research paper thumbnail of Foundations of Location Based Services

After completion of the lesson you will be able to… • identify the components and participants of... more After completion of the lesson you will be able to… • identify the components and participants of LBS applications,

Research paper thumbnail of A service-oriented architecture to enable participatory planning: an e-planning platform

Recent advances in Web technologies have opened avenues to create socio-technical platforms that ... more Recent advances in Web technologies have opened avenues to create socio-technical platforms that can empower citizens in urban planning processes. The rise of the GeoWeb and the popularity of Web 2.0 collaborative tools can facilitate the develop- ment of a new generation of bottom-up Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) platforms that can incorporate user-generated content into Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). New service-based delivery mechanisms can provide architectural flexibility and adaptability, and enable the public to benefit from ubiquitous information access. From an e-participation perspective, Web 2.0 social networking functions support interactive communication among various PPGIS stakeholders, e.g., citizens, planners, and decision makers. The main contribution of this article is to present a reference architecture for e-planning platforms that (1) facilitates effective e-participation by allowing multidirectional map-based communication among various land development stakeholders (e.g., planners, decision makers, citizens, etc.), and (2) enables incorporation of visualization, evaluation, and discussion capabilities to support community planning processes. To achieve this, we developed a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that exploits SDI principles and Web 2.0 technologies. The platform architecture allows heterogeneous data sources, analytical functionality and tools, and presentation frameworks to be plugged into a coherent system to provide a planning and decision support platform. We present two real-world implementations of the proposed architecture that have been developed to support community engagement in the City of Calgary, Canada.

Research paper thumbnail of Relations among Map Objects in Cartographic Generalization

Research paper thumbnail of An Approach for the Classification of Urban Building Structures Based on Discriminant Analysis Techniques

ABSTRACT Recognition of urban structures is of interest in cartography and urban modelling. While... more ABSTRACT Recognition of urban structures is of interest in cartography and urban modelling. While a broad range of typologies of urban patterns have been published in the last century, relatively little research on the automated recognition of such structures exists. This work presents a sample-based approach for the recognition of five types of urban structures: (1) inner city areas, (2) industrial and commercial areas, (3) urban areas, (4) suburban areas and (5) rural areas. The classification approach is based only on the characterisation of building geometries with morphological measures derived from perceptual principles of Gestalt psychology. Thereby, size, shape and density of buildings are evaluated. After defining the research questions we develop the classification methodology and evaluate the approach with respect to several aspects. The experiments focus on the impact of different classification algorithms, correlations and contributions of measures, parameterisation of buffer-based indices, and mode filtering. In addition to that, we investigate the influence of scale and regional factors. The results show that the chosen approach is generally successful. It turns out that scale, algorithm parameterisation, and regional heterogeneity of building structures substantially influence the classification performance.

Research paper thumbnail of Modelling Geographic Relationships in Automated Environments

Automated processes such as cartographic generalisation require formal abstraction of the geograp... more Automated processes such as cartographic generalisation require formal abstraction of the geographic space in order to analyse, process and transform it. Spatial relations are key to understanding geographic space and their modelling is a critical issue. This chapter reports on existing classifications and modelling frameworks for spatial relations. A generic model is proposed for building an ontology of spatial relations for automatic processes such as generalisation or ondemand mapping, with a focus on so-called multiple representation relations. Propositions to use such ontology in an automated environment are reported. The three use cases of the chapter describe recent research that uses relations modelling. The first use case is the extension of CityGML with relations for 3D city models. The second use case presents the use of spatial relations for automatic spatial analysis, and particularly the grouping of natural features such as lakes or islands. Finally, the third use case is a data migration model guided by relations that govern the positioning of thematic data upon changing reference data.

Research paper thumbnail of Teaching GIScience with Free and Open Source Software?–A first Assessment

Research paper thumbnail of Implementation and comparison of home range estimators for grizzly bears in Alberta, Canada, based on GPS data

Research paper thumbnail of A scaled line-based kernel density estimator for the retrieval of utilization distributions and home ranges from GPS movement tracks

Utilization distributions (UDs) can be used to describe with what intensity an animal or human ma... more Utilization distributions (UDs) can be used to describe with what intensity an animal or human may use a certain geographical location within the environment it is living in. Such a density distribution model represents one way to describe and obtain an animals' home range in wildlife ecology. Several methods to derive UDs and subsequently home ranges have been developed, for instance Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) and Brownian Bridges (BB), two probabilistic approaches, and Local Convex Hull (LoCoH) methods. KDE and LoCoH have been developed with point-based datasets in mind that describe the observation of an animal, and hence don't utilize additional information that comes with GPSbased tracking data from collars. We have extended the point-based KDE approach to work with sequential GPS-point tracks, calling it a line-based KDE. We (i) introduce the basicapproach, (ii) refine it by introducing a scaling function to achieve a better model for the utilization function of space, and (iii) compare results of our approach with point-KDE and BB. Advantages of the line-based KDE by design are a better representation of utilization density near GPS points in comparison with the BB approach, and the ability to model and retain travel corridors in comparison with the point-KDE.

Research paper thumbnail of OpenJUMP HoRAE—A free GIS and toolbox for home‐range analysis

Over the past twenty years a set of methods for home-range estimation and analysis of animal obse... more Over the past twenty years a set of methods for home-range estimation and analysis of animal observation data have been developed. Whereas comparisons among the estimation methods and different estimation software are available, only the adahabitat analysis toolbox for R is under a free and open source software license and includes established and new home range estimation approaches, such as Kernel Density Estimation, Brownian Bridges and Local Convex Hulls. However, R and adehabitat are rather catering the needs of the scientific user and not the wildlife manager with respect to its general look & feel, and further, provide only a limited set of functions for the analysis of home ranges with environmental geodata, e.g. land-cover and elevation data. This article presents a free and open-source home range analysis toolbox that (i) focuses on the evaluation of GPS collar data, (ii) aims to be fairly straight forward to use by the wildlife manager, and (iii) integrates with a desktop GIS to allow data analysis beyond the creation of home ranges. Since the developed software is distributed under a free and open source license also research can benefit since implemented algorithms can be directly tested and improved.

Research paper thumbnail of The 2012 free and open source GIS software map–A guide to facilitate research, development, and adoption

Over the last decade an increasing number of free and open source software projects have been fou... more Over the last decade an increasing number of free and open source software projects have been founded that concentrate on developing several types of software for geographic data collection, storage, analysis and visualization. We first identify the drivers of such software projects and identify different types of geographic information software, e.g. desktop GIS, remote sensing software, server GIS etc. We then list the major projects for each software category. Afterwards we discuss the points that should be considered if free and open source software is to be selected for use in business and research, such as software functionality, license types and their restrictions, developer and user community characteristics, etc. Finally possible future developments are addressed.

Research paper thumbnail of PlanYourPlace-A geospatial infrastructure for sustainable community planning

Research paper thumbnail of Recognition of Large Island Structures for Map Generalization

Research paper thumbnail of Techniques for LBS Cartography

Page 1. Techniques for LBS Cartography Responsible persons: Moritz Neun (Overall) Alistair Edward... more Page 1. Techniques for LBS Cartography Responsible persons: Moritz Neun (Overall) Alistair Edwardes (Specials) Stefan Steiniger (Specials) Page 2. Page 3. Content 1. Techniques for LBS Cartography ..... 2 1.1. ...

Research paper thumbnail of 景观生态学中的自由开源地理信息工具

Research paper thumbnail of PlanYourPlace: Merging Social Networks and Participatory GIS for Participatory Planning

The planning and execution of urban development projects should involve citizen participation. Ci... more The planning and execution of urban development projects should involve citizen participation. Citizen participation is essential if the needs of the population are to be addressed when undertaking public development projects, and participation is essential if private construction projects are to be accepted by the residents that live adjacent to and within such projects. As a new -complementary -form of citizen engagement the planning and participatory Geographic Information Systems (GIS) literature proposes the use of Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate engagement with a broader range of citizens. The PlanYourPlace project was established to develop such a participatory planning platform for communities within and surrounding the City of Calgary. In particular the platform should enable citizens to voice their opinions, and facilitate discussion of urban development scenarios between citizenry, city planners, and decision makers. Social networks provide functions that allow participants to inform, discuss, vote and share, whereas GIS provides functions for creating plans and performing impact assessments. Hence, the proposed planning platform merges social networking with GIS. In this article we outline what functionality the participatory planning platform should provide, and discuss constraints that emerge when considering the platform user, the intended user activities, the context of use, and access to data. We will then present a technical architecture for the web platform that can address these constraints. Subsequently we report on the current state of implementation and outline challenges for future work.

Research paper thumbnail of Recognition of Large Island Structures for Map Gen eralization

Research paper thumbnail of GIS Software - A description in 1000 words

Software that is used to create, manage, analyze and visualize geographic data, i.e. data with a ... more Software that is used to create, manage, analyze and visualize geographic data, i.e. data with a reference to a place on earth, is usually denoted by the umbrella term 'GIS software'. Typical applications for GIS software include the evaluation of places for the location of new stores, the management of power and gas lines, the creation of maps, the analysis of past crimes for crime prevention, route calculations for transport tasks, the management of forests, parks and infrastructure, such as roads and water ways, as well as applications in risk analysis of natural hazards, and emergency planning and response. For this multitude of applications different types of

Research paper thumbnail of USAGE OF PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS IN THE PROCESS OF AUTOMATED GENERALISATION

Current generalisation approaches use cartographic constraints for the situation analysis and eva... more Current generalisation approaches use cartographic constraints for the situation analysis and evaluation, as well as the selection of generalisation operators. Despite the importance of the constraints for the whole generalisation process, little research has been done about relationships between constraints and their interdependencies. The aim of this paper is the investigation of such relationships with help of Principal Component Analysis

Research paper thumbnail of A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR AUTOMATED GENERALIZATION AND ITS APPLICATION TO GEOLOGIC AND SOIL MAPS

Independent Component Analysis, 2000

Research in map generalization starts to focus on other types of maps than on topographic maps on... more Research in map generalization starts to focus on other types of maps than on topographic maps only. There- fore, new generalization concepts have to be developed, extending on the experiences and research efforts originally made in topographic generalization. This paper presents a new conceptual framework of map generalization with re- spect to thematic mapping based on an analysis of the

Research paper thumbnail of Relations and Structures in Categorical Maps

Abstract, Focusing on thematic and more specifically, cate-gorical maps, the paper emphasises the... more Abstract, Focusing on thematic and more specifically, cate-gorical maps, the paper emphasises the importance of horizontal relations in automated generalisation. A literature review shows that automated generalisation of thematic maps has not received ample attention. It shows further that the extraction and use of relations in topographic maps for generalisation purposes is making progress, but no systematic categorisation for relations

Research paper thumbnail of Foundations of Location Based Services

After completion of the lesson you will be able to… • identify the components and participants of... more After completion of the lesson you will be able to… • identify the components and participants of LBS applications,

Research paper thumbnail of A service-oriented architecture to enable participatory planning: an e-planning platform

Recent advances in Web technologies have opened avenues to create socio-technical platforms that ... more Recent advances in Web technologies have opened avenues to create socio-technical platforms that can empower citizens in urban planning processes. The rise of the GeoWeb and the popularity of Web 2.0 collaborative tools can facilitate the develop- ment of a new generation of bottom-up Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) platforms that can incorporate user-generated content into Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). New service-based delivery mechanisms can provide architectural flexibility and adaptability, and enable the public to benefit from ubiquitous information access. From an e-participation perspective, Web 2.0 social networking functions support interactive communication among various PPGIS stakeholders, e.g., citizens, planners, and decision makers. The main contribution of this article is to present a reference architecture for e-planning platforms that (1) facilitates effective e-participation by allowing multidirectional map-based communication among various land development stakeholders (e.g., planners, decision makers, citizens, etc.), and (2) enables incorporation of visualization, evaluation, and discussion capabilities to support community planning processes. To achieve this, we developed a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that exploits SDI principles and Web 2.0 technologies. The platform architecture allows heterogeneous data sources, analytical functionality and tools, and presentation frameworks to be plugged into a coherent system to provide a planning and decision support platform. We present two real-world implementations of the proposed architecture that have been developed to support community engagement in the City of Calgary, Canada.

Research paper thumbnail of Relations among Map Objects in Cartographic Generalization

Research paper thumbnail of An Approach for the Classification of Urban Building Structures Based on Discriminant Analysis Techniques

ABSTRACT Recognition of urban structures is of interest in cartography and urban modelling. While... more ABSTRACT Recognition of urban structures is of interest in cartography and urban modelling. While a broad range of typologies of urban patterns have been published in the last century, relatively little research on the automated recognition of such structures exists. This work presents a sample-based approach for the recognition of five types of urban structures: (1) inner city areas, (2) industrial and commercial areas, (3) urban areas, (4) suburban areas and (5) rural areas. The classification approach is based only on the characterisation of building geometries with morphological measures derived from perceptual principles of Gestalt psychology. Thereby, size, shape and density of buildings are evaluated. After defining the research questions we develop the classification methodology and evaluate the approach with respect to several aspects. The experiments focus on the impact of different classification algorithms, correlations and contributions of measures, parameterisation of buffer-based indices, and mode filtering. In addition to that, we investigate the influence of scale and regional factors. The results show that the chosen approach is generally successful. It turns out that scale, algorithm parameterisation, and regional heterogeneity of building structures substantially influence the classification performance.

Research paper thumbnail of Modelling Geographic Relationships in Automated Environments

Automated processes such as cartographic generalisation require formal abstraction of the geograp... more Automated processes such as cartographic generalisation require formal abstraction of the geographic space in order to analyse, process and transform it. Spatial relations are key to understanding geographic space and their modelling is a critical issue. This chapter reports on existing classifications and modelling frameworks for spatial relations. A generic model is proposed for building an ontology of spatial relations for automatic processes such as generalisation or ondemand mapping, with a focus on so-called multiple representation relations. Propositions to use such ontology in an automated environment are reported. The three use cases of the chapter describe recent research that uses relations modelling. The first use case is the extension of CityGML with relations for 3D city models. The second use case presents the use of spatial relations for automatic spatial analysis, and particularly the grouping of natural features such as lakes or islands. Finally, the third use case is a data migration model guided by relations that govern the positioning of thematic data upon changing reference data.

Research paper thumbnail of Teaching GIScience with Free and Open Source Software?–A first Assessment

Research paper thumbnail of Implementation and comparison of home range estimators for grizzly bears in Alberta, Canada, based on GPS data

Research paper thumbnail of A scaled line-based kernel density estimator for the retrieval of utilization distributions and home ranges from GPS movement tracks

Utilization distributions (UDs) can be used to describe with what intensity an animal or human ma... more Utilization distributions (UDs) can be used to describe with what intensity an animal or human may use a certain geographical location within the environment it is living in. Such a density distribution model represents one way to describe and obtain an animals' home range in wildlife ecology. Several methods to derive UDs and subsequently home ranges have been developed, for instance Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) and Brownian Bridges (BB), two probabilistic approaches, and Local Convex Hull (LoCoH) methods. KDE and LoCoH have been developed with point-based datasets in mind that describe the observation of an animal, and hence don't utilize additional information that comes with GPSbased tracking data from collars. We have extended the point-based KDE approach to work with sequential GPS-point tracks, calling it a line-based KDE. We (i) introduce the basicapproach, (ii) refine it by introducing a scaling function to achieve a better model for the utilization function of space, and (iii) compare results of our approach with point-KDE and BB. Advantages of the line-based KDE by design are a better representation of utilization density near GPS points in comparison with the BB approach, and the ability to model and retain travel corridors in comparison with the point-KDE.

Research paper thumbnail of OpenJUMP HoRAE—A free GIS and toolbox for home‐range analysis

Over the past twenty years a set of methods for home-range estimation and analysis of animal obse... more Over the past twenty years a set of methods for home-range estimation and analysis of animal observation data have been developed. Whereas comparisons among the estimation methods and different estimation software are available, only the adahabitat analysis toolbox for R is under a free and open source software license and includes established and new home range estimation approaches, such as Kernel Density Estimation, Brownian Bridges and Local Convex Hulls. However, R and adehabitat are rather catering the needs of the scientific user and not the wildlife manager with respect to its general look & feel, and further, provide only a limited set of functions for the analysis of home ranges with environmental geodata, e.g. land-cover and elevation data. This article presents a free and open-source home range analysis toolbox that (i) focuses on the evaluation of GPS collar data, (ii) aims to be fairly straight forward to use by the wildlife manager, and (iii) integrates with a desktop GIS to allow data analysis beyond the creation of home ranges. Since the developed software is distributed under a free and open source license also research can benefit since implemented algorithms can be directly tested and improved.

Research paper thumbnail of The 2012 free and open source GIS software map–A guide to facilitate research, development, and adoption

Over the last decade an increasing number of free and open source software projects have been fou... more Over the last decade an increasing number of free and open source software projects have been founded that concentrate on developing several types of software for geographic data collection, storage, analysis and visualization. We first identify the drivers of such software projects and identify different types of geographic information software, e.g. desktop GIS, remote sensing software, server GIS etc. We then list the major projects for each software category. Afterwards we discuss the points that should be considered if free and open source software is to be selected for use in business and research, such as software functionality, license types and their restrictions, developer and user community characteristics, etc. Finally possible future developments are addressed.

Research paper thumbnail of PlanYourPlace-A geospatial infrastructure for sustainable community planning

Research paper thumbnail of Recognition of Large Island Structures for Map Generalization

Research paper thumbnail of Techniques for LBS Cartography

Page 1. Techniques for LBS Cartography Responsible persons: Moritz Neun (Overall) Alistair Edward... more Page 1. Techniques for LBS Cartography Responsible persons: Moritz Neun (Overall) Alistair Edwardes (Specials) Stefan Steiniger (Specials) Page 2. Page 3. Content 1. Techniques for LBS Cartography ..... 2 1.1. ...

Research paper thumbnail of 景观生态学中的自由开源地理信息工具