Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications

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    Qualitative reasoning about consistency in geographic information
    Duckham, M ; Lingham, J ; Mason, K ; Worboys, M (Elsevier BV, 2006-03)
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    Discuss: a soft computing approach to spatial disaggregation in economic evaluation of public policies
    Paez, Daniel ; Williamson, Ian P. ; BISHOP, IAN ( 2006)
    For more than three decades cost-benefit analysis (CBA) has been used in many countries as an important tool for evaluating public policies. More recently, participation of stakeholders in CBA processes has become an important issue for governments. However, CBA by itself does not provide a good environment for stakeholder participation. A major reason for this is the lack of spatial disaggregation in traditional CBA. In order to allow greater public participation, a GIS based approach is proposed. This approach uses a Geocomputational system, which incorporates soft computing theory with expert systems in a geographic information systems (GIS) environment. It is designed to generate representations of environmental, economic and social policy outcomes according to the perceptions of the stakeholders and after the CBA results have been obtained. The methodology proposed for modelling impacts in cases where uncertainty exists uses the soft computing theory of fuzzy logic to generate a raster map based on spatial inputs provided by the stakeholders involved in the decision process. This computer based system, called DISCUSS (Decision Information System for Community Understanding of Spatial Scenarios), is intended for situations where the government chooses to evaluate a policy using CBA and desires to encourage public participation in evaluating the results identified by the economic methodology. DISCUSS and the maps that it produces are being tested in a public participation case study with long-term impacts over a large area of south-eastern Australia.
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    A formal ontological structure for semantic interoperability of GIS and environmental modeling
    Fallahi, Gholam Reza ; Mesgari, Mohammad Saadi ; RAJABIFARD, ABBAS ; Frank, Andrew U. ( 2008)
    Most of the environmental problems have an obvious spatial dimension and Geographic Information System (GIS) are widely used for solving environmental problems. Service oriented architecture in distributed computing environment with loosely coupled geoservices 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 new layers for describing geoservices. 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 related to geo-services. An upper ontology adds new general concepts to an existing ontology in order to make 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.