Flexible geospatial platform for distributed and collaborative urban modelling

Abstract

This chapter presents the framework for and implementation of a flexible, loosely coupled geoportal platform for supporting distributed urban modelling with spatially detailed land use and transportation interactions. The proposed framework is built upon open source applications, such as Apache, PostgreSQL, MapServer, Drupal, Flex, and MediaWiki, with minimal custom code and some integration of proprietary tools such as ArcGIS Server. It provides collaborative tools to support parallel development and interconnection of complex model components in a manner that facilitates the visualization, discussion, and sharing of intermediate results. Large-scale land use, transportation and environment modelling contains many components which are themselves complex, in various stages of development, and distributed among different research groups. Many of the datasets needed for model calibration are incomplete, more aggregated than desired, or yet to be acquired. The geoportal platform is aimed at accelerating the realistic evolution of modelling data and cross-group learning as well as enhancing sense-making during early stages of model exploration and integration. The development and sharing of origin/destination matrices and modelling results from four scenarios are used to illustrate the types of visualization and cross-group interactions that are facilitated.