ESTABLISHING A TEST ENVIRONMENT FOR UBIQUITOUS GEOSPATIAL APPLICATIONS

T. Sarjakoski, L.T. Sarjakoski, R. Kuittinen

Finnish Geodetic Institute

tapani.sarjakoski@fgi.fi

 

The development of geospatial information systems, mobile interactive terminals, positioning systems and integration of multiple digital services enable new possibilities for exploiting locational information. Future ubiquitous map services will be integrated to multimodal tools for spatial communication and take, for example, advantage of embedded tags in environment. The new technologies can be adopted to support the task and context related information needs of the users in real-time. The new paradigm in geospatial information technology can be seen as a reflection of such generic paradigms as ambient intelligence and ubiquitous computing. Weiser (1991) visioned that in the near future a great number of computers in a ubiquitous network will be present in our everyday life.

 

The objective of the paper is to discuss the establishment of Nuuksio test environment for ubiquitous geospatial applications. The project started in 2006 at the Finnish Geodetic Institute (FGI), and the aim is to support the researchers and application developers to develop next generation instruments and applications acting with ubiquitous network of computers. The Nuuksio recreation area, situated in southern Finland, is used for outdoors activities.

 

An extensive 3D data capture, including airborne scanning and mobile mapping based on terrestrial laser scanning and photogrammetry has already taken place. An area of 100 km² (of the total 14 x 17 km² test area) was laser scanned in 2006. The scanning was carried out from 1000 m with an average point density 1/m². The area has also been covered by digital aerial photos. A topographic database from National Land Survey, Finland covering the whole area has been received for research purposes. Additionally, a number of other data sources will be used.

 

The paper describes and analyses the necessary requirements of the test environment. The test environment will support the functionality of various terminals for ubiquitous applications (PDAs, cell phones, wearable computers, audio and augmented interfaces). The vision of the FGI is to build a Sensor Web, a network of sensors accessible over the Internet. In addition to the sensor network, active tags will be placed on ’landmarks’ or Points of Interest (POIs) covering the most interesting places in the area. Methods for 3D visualisation, multimodality and virtual reality can be applied and combined in new ways in ubiquitous applications, where sensor networks are used to collect many types of information from the environment. This information can be presented together with spatial information and new GI application areas can be created.