Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications

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    Automatic spatial metadata enrichment: reducing metadata creation burden through spatial folksonomies
    Kalantari, Mohsen ; OLFAT, HAMED ; RAJABIFARD, ABBAS (Leuven University Press, 2010)
    Metadata plays a key role in facilitating access to up-to-date spatial information and contributes to the finding and delivering of high quality spatial information services to users. In particular, metadata is an important element in functioning and facilitating spatial data infrastructure (SDI) initiatives. With huge amount of spatial information being generated, a spatial application must be sufficiently flexible to extract and update spatial metadata automatically. Automatic spatial metadata generation framework includes three fundamental but complementary streams; automatic creation, automatic update and automatic enrichment of spatial metadata. This paper explores the automatic metadata enrichment stream based on the tagging and folksonomy concepts. The paper argues how folksonomies help bringing the vocabulary of spatial data users into play and using them hand in hand with those sometimes mysterious terms supplied by experts in metadata records. The paper then builds on the tagging and folksonomy concepts and proposes a conceptual model to employ them for spatial metadata enrichment. The paper finally discusses advantages and disadvantages of this approach against formal type of organizing spatial metadata.
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    Exploring the key areas of spatial metadata automation research in Australia
    OLFAT, HAMED ; Kalantari, Mohsen ; RAJABIFARD, ABBAS ; Williamson, Ian P. ; Pettit, Christopher ; Williams, Stephen (Leuven University Press, 2010)
    Improving the spatial metadata management process to facilitate data discovery, access and retrieval through an SDI platform has been the goal of a number of organizations at different jurisdictional levels in Australia. A current linkage research project titled “Spatial Metadata Automation” is being conducted at the University of Melbourne in conjunction with some industry partners. This research project aims to explore different approaches for automating spatial metadata so that the process of creating and updating spatial metadata – where feasible – becomes automatic. As part of the project an online questionnaire was designed and distributed within the major organizations dealing with spatial data in Australia to assess the users’ needs regarding metadata automation and also the current status of the activities in metadata creation and updating. This paper presents the results of the assessment process and explores the key areas of spatial metadata automation research in Australia. It also reviews some of the more important initiatives regarding spatial metadata in this country and explains the characteristics and framework of the current research. The paper then discusses the structure of the questionnaire and the results of the responses analysis. Finally, the findings, future needs and research questions are presented.
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    Cadastral futures: building a new vision for the nature and role of cadastres
    Bennet, Rohan ; Rjabifard, Abbas ; Kalantari, Mohsen ; WALLACE, JUDE ; WILLIAMSON, IAN (FIG Congress 2010, 2010)
    Over the last thirty years spatial information technologies and sustainability theory drove the creation of new visions, models and roles for the cadastre. Concepts including multi purpose cadastres, Cadastre 2014, and sustainable land administration radically altered understandings of the cadastre and its potential. Many of these concepts continue to be relevant in the contemporary context; however, like all disciplines, cadastral science must continue to look to the future to remain relevant. This paper begins this process and aims to provide preliminary insights into the characteristics and potential role of future cadastres. A qualitative research design based upon an exploratory case study underpins the research. Factors including globalisation, population urbanization, good governance, climate-change response, environmental management, 3D visualization/analysis technologies, wireless sensor networks, standardization, and interoperability are found to be driving developments in the cadastral domain. Consequently, six design elements of future cadastre emerge: Survey-Accurate Cadastres, Object-Oriented Cadastres, 3D/4D Cadastres, Real-Time Cadastres, Global Cadastres, and Organic Cadastres. Together, these elements provide a preliminary vision for the role and nature of future cadastres: the elements can be seen as likely characteristics of future cadastres. Collaborative research, potentially through the FIG framework, would enable further development of these design elements and would assist in defining the nature and role of future cadastral systems.
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    Automatic spatial metadata update: a new approach
    OLFAT, HAMED ; RAJABIFARD, ABBAS ; Kalantari, Mohsen (FIG Congress 2010 - Facing the Challenges - Building the Capacity, 2010)
    Spatial metadata is a vital tool for spatial data management, retrieval and distribution. It is also a critical component for any spatial data sharing platform which provides users with information about the purpose, quality, actuality and accuracy of spatial datasets. With the amount of spatial data exchanged through the web environment, the demand for automatic spatial metadata creation and updating to describe such resources is increasing. However, automatic spatial metadata updating is still in its infancy and automatic approaches are being explored by researchers. So far different processes and tools have been developed which generate and update a limited number of spatial metadata elements in different standard schemes automatically, thus a large amount of spatial data elements need to be imported manually. In order to improve this situation, this paper aims at exploring a new synchronisation approach based on XML/GML technologies to automate spatial metadata update process, by which dataset properties are read from the dataset file and written into its metadata file automatically. The paper first discusses the important role of metadata in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs)as an enabling platform and proposes an architecture to manage spatial metadata. It then compares different methods of spatial metadata generation and presents a spatial metadata automation framework. Based on this framework, the paper finally introduces a synchronisation approach to achieve the spatial metadata automatic update.
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    A synchronisation approach to automate spatial metadata updating
    Olfat, Hameed ; RAJABIFARD, ABBAS ; Kalantari, Mohsen (Centre of Geo-Information Technologies, 2010)
    This paper presents a new approach to automate spatial metadata updating process, by which dataset properties are read from the dataset fi le and written into its metadata fi le automatically.