Recent and present research actions

• Photopolis project (updating urban database from aerial photos) (1990-1999)
• Quality control of geographic database (1990-now)
• Visual languages for GIS (1995-2002)
• Field-oriented databases in meteorology (1999-2003)
• Auditory urban information system (1998-2001)
• Telegeomonitoring
• GIS Interoperability (1995-2002)
• Groupware for Urban Planning (1994-2000)
• TOWNTOLOGY: An Ontology for Urban Planning (2002-now)
• Real Time GIS (2003-now)
• Automatic generation of chorema maps (2006-now).

Photopolis project
 
 

The goal of the Photopolis project is updating urban geographic databases from aerial photos. Preliminary works were done for the city of Padua, Italy during the PhD's of Sylvie SERVIGNE (in 1993) and of Carlo SCHENONE (in 1994).

The key-idea was to compare aerial photos and cadasters in order to find differences. For that a common model and a knowledge base must be defined and implemented.

TELLEZ Bruno (co-supervised with Sylvie SERVIGNE) has found several more efficient algorithms and methods, especially based on Delaunay triangulation. His PhD was submitted in December 1999.

See a slideshow for a complete introduction to this research project.

Key papers in English:

S. Servigne, R. Laurini Detecting Changes in Geographic Database Using Aerial Photos Proceedings of the Symposium ISPRS "Mapping and GIS", Athens, Georgia, May 31- June 3, 1994. Volume 30, Part 4, Edited by Roy WELCH and M. REMILLARD, pp 318-324.

S. Servigne, R. Laurini Updating Geographic Databases Using Multi-Source Information. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Workshop on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, Baltimore, MD December 1-2, 1995. ACM Press. Edited by P. Bergougnoux, K. Makki, N. Pissinou pp 119-126.

B. Tellez, S. Servigne, R. Laurini : Structural maps for matching aerial photos and cadastre. First CASSINI International Workshop "Data Quality in Geographic Information: from Error to Uncertainty" April 21-23 1997, Paris. Hermès, pp 173-185.

Bruno TELLEZ : "Méthodologie pour une structuration commune des photos aériennes et des plans cadastraux : application à la révision des bases de données urbaines". PhD in Computing, December 16, 1999.

Quality control of geographic database
 
 

The objective of this action is to organize the quality control of geographic database, especially at topological level. Preliminary studies were made by Robert LAURINI and Françoise MILLERET-RAFFORT in 1991, by defining spatial integrity constraints. Then Thierry UBEDA in his PhD (1997), co-supervised with Sylvie SERVIGNE, by using Egenhofer model has proposed a new model, and a language for specifying topological quality control in order to automatically correct topological errors. Then, a visual interface allows the correcting of ambiguities, or corrections needing extra information. This research was partly financed by CASSINI.

Alain PURICELLI's PhD (submitted in December 2000) made in connection with the Greater Lyon Council aims at controlling all the geographic databases of this local authority (more than 1 300 000 inhabitants), only at topological level.

 Key papers in English:

R. Laurini, F. Milleret-Raffort Using Integrity Constraints for Checking Consistency of Spatial Databases. GIS/LIS'91 Proceedings, Atlanta, Georgia, October 28 -November 1, 1991. ISBN 0-944426-75-1 pp. 634-642.

R. Laurini, F. Milleret-Raffort Topological Reorganization of Inconsistent Geographic Databases: a step Towards their Certification Computer and Graphics. Vol 18, 6 pp 803-813 December 1994.

T. Ubeda, A. Puricelli, S. Servigne, R. Laurini : A Methodology for Spatial Inconsistency Checking and Correcting. First CASSINI International Workshop "Data Quality in Geographic Information: from Error to Uncertainty" April 21-23 1997, Paris. Hermès, pp. 111-119.

S. Servigne, T. Ubeda, A. Puricelli, R. Laurini : "A Methodology for Spatial Consistency Improvement of Geographic Databases". In : GeoInformatica. 2000, Vol.4, Issue 1 pp. 7-34.

T. Ubeda : "Contrôle de la Qualité spatiale des bases de données géographiques : cohérence topologique et corrections d'erreurs". PhD, December 1^st, 1997. Click here to get the full text in French.

A. Puricelli : "Réingénierie et Contrôle Qualité des Données en vue d'une Migration Technologique". PhD, December 18, 2000.

Visual languages for GIS
 
 

The goal of this research action is to define and implement visual concepts for defining and manipulating geographic information. For that, Marie-Aude AUFAURE, in her PhD (1992) defined visual operators for topology (CIGALES project). Then Ahmed LBATH (PhD in 1997) has proposed and implemented a CASE tool for geomatic applications (AIGLE) allowing to visually define and manipulate geographic data, in connection with the CIRIL company.

Now, Christine BONHOMME co-supervised with Marie-AUFAURE, continues this work, especially by extending CIGALES by using spatio-temporal visual operators (PhD submitted in December 2000), and Franck FAVETTA is working for solving graphic ambiguities.

See a slideshow for a complete introduction to this research project.

Key papers in English:

R. Laurini Towards Visual Interfaces for Multi-Source Updating of Geographic Information NATO Advanced Research Workshop, Cognitive Aspects of Human Computer Interfaces for Geographic Information Systems, Palma, March 21-24, 1994. Edited by T. Nyerges, D. Mark, M. Engenhofer, R. Laurini. Spinger-Verlag. pp 147-162.

A. Lbath, MA Aufaure-Portier, R. Laurini, "Using Visual Language for the Design and Query in GIS" Customization". Second International Conference on Visual Information Systems. San Diego December 1997, pp. 197-204.

C. Bonhomme, C. Trepied, MA Aufaure, R. Laurini : "A Visual Language for Querying Spatio-Temporal Databases . Proceedings of the 7^th International Symposium on GIS, ACMGIS'99, Kansas City, November 5-6, 1999, edited by C. Bauzer-Medeiros, ACM-Press, pp. 34-39.

 
Field-oriented databases in meteorology
 

The LISI has pioneered field-oriented database systems in Dillon PARIENTE's PhD submitted in 1994, for storing and manipulating continuous spatio-temporal information. The key-ideas were first to define a new abstract data type for field data, and second using a pyramid of cellular automata to estimate field data anywhere, by following spatio-temporal constraints and Laplace equation.

With the LIFIA laboratory of National University of La Plata/Buenos Aires in Argentina, for Silvia GORDILLO's PhD, we have decided to extend Pariente's work in order to develop a more powerful field-oriented language, to index field data and to extend operators for dealing with global (earthwide) fields. Catty Mostaccio from the same university studies the implementation aspects of field-oriented databases.

The goal of Said Ouatik El Alaoui's PhD, made at the University of Rabat, Morocco, under the responsibility of Dr. Salma Mouline in connection with LISI, was to extend SQL in order to deal with continuous spatio-temporal field-orientation (submitted end of July 1999).

See a slideshow for a complete introduction to this research project.

Key papers in English:

R. Laurini, D. Pariente : Towards a Field-oriented Language: First Specifications. In "Geographic Objects with Indeterminate Boundaries" Edited by Burrough and Frank, Taylor and Francis, 1996, pp. 225-236

Auditory urban information system
 
 Noise appears as a nuisance in cities, but a soundless city, i.e. without any noise at all, is not possible. The goal of this research action, started in 1997 is to define the concept of soundscape, to define an auditory urban database, to implement it in order to compare soundscape everywhere in cities, and to simulate sounds for new urban developments. This work is financed by the French Cities Agency, and CASSINI; it is done in collaboration with the Grenoble laboratories CRESSON and CSTB, under the responsibility of Sylvie SERVIGNE.

Myoung-Ah KANG is in charge of this action for her PhD, in collaboration with Dr Ki Joune LI of the South Korean Pusan National University, and a grant from EIFFEL.

See a slideshow for a complete introduction to this research project.

Ph Dissertation

Myoung-Ah KANG : "Indexation et visualisation des données de champs continus dans les systèmes d'information géographiques". Thèse de Doctorat "Informatique, Information pour la Société" de Lyon, 20 décembre 2001. Encadrée avec Sylvie Servigne.

Key papers in English:

LAURINI R., LI KJ, SERVIGNE S., KANG MA (1999) Modeling an Auditory Urban Database with a Field-Oriented Approach. INFORMATICA, Volume 23 (1999) pp. 169-185.

SERVIGNE S., KANG MA, LAURINI R., (1999) First Specifications of an Information System for Urban Soundscape. IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems '99, Florence, June 7-11, 1999, Volume II, pp. 262-266.

SERVIGNE S., LAURINI R., KANG MA, BALAY O., ARLAUD B., LI KJ (1999) A Prototype of an Information System for Urban Soundscape. 21^st Urban Data Management Symposium, Venise, 20-22 Avril 1999.

LAURINI R., SERVIGNE S. An Information System for Urban Soundscape URISA'99, Urban and Regional Information Systems Association, Chicago, August 21-25, 1999.

MA KANG, S. SERVIGNE, KJ LI, R. LAURINI : Indexing Field Values in Field Oriented Systems: Interval Quadtree. Proceedings of the 8^th International Conference on Information Knowledge Management (CIKM'99), Kansas City, November 2-6, 1999, edited by S. Gauch, ACM-Press, pp. 335-342.

Telegeomonitoring
 
 

The connection of GIS and telecommunication is more and more important. Tullio TANZI's PhD (submitted in 1998), made in connection with the GRANIOU and ESCOTA companies, aimed at defining a real-time system for motorway safety and management. In parallel, an action (1996-1999) was made with Hassan II University of Mohammedia with Prof. Azedine BOULMAKOUL for the design of a real time GIS for the transportation of hazardous material, with a French-Moroccan grant (CMIFM). After those actions, the concept of telegeomonitoring was clear.

As a consequence, it was decided to organize in May 1999 a workshop in Lyon on TeleGeoProcessing (TeleGeo 99). The second was in Nice (TeleGeo 2000) in May 2000. The next one will be in Paris in January 2002.

Second, with the CIRIL company, following the know-how issued from Ahmed LBATH's PhD, it was decided to launch a research project with this company for developing a CASE tool for telegeomonitoring systems. This is the goal of François PINET's PhD initiated in February 1999.

On this domain, seminars have been given at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in November 98, at the National University of La Plata/Buenos Aires in February 1999, at the University of Ottawa in August 1999, in Algiers October 1999, in Lisbon November 1999, in Miami in January 2001.

In autumn 2000, one new actions was launched: Nicolas GIMMILLARO will design a complete telegeomonitoring system for the transportation of hazardous materials. A special grant from the French ACI program "Ville" was afforded, and this work is made in collaboration with Professors Niki Pissinou and Kia Makki of the "Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology" of the Florida International University. Emphases will be given to the real time search of paths with minimum risk, and the solving of telegeomonitoring queries.

See a slideshow for a complete introduction to TeleGeoMonitoring.
 

Key papers in English:

LAURINI R., SERVIGNE S., TANZI T. (2001) A Primer on TeleGeoProcessing and TeleGeoMonitoring. "Computers, Environment and Urban Systems". Volume 25, 3, pp. 249-265.

TANZI TJ, GUIOL R., LAURINI R., SERVIGNE S. (1998) A System for Motorway Management Based on Risk Rate Estimation. Safety Science 30 (1998) pp. 9-23.

LAURINI R. TeleGeoMonitoring, Invited Paper, GISRUK Conference Southampton, UK, April 14-16, 1999

BOULMAKOUL A., LAURINI R., SERVIGNE S. IDRISSI MAJ (1999) First Specifications of a TeleGeoMonitoring System for the Transportation of Hazardous Materials.Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Volume 23,4, July 1999, pp.259-270.

TANZI TJ, LAURINI R., SERVIGNE S. (1999) A Prototype of TeleGeoMonitoring System for Road Safety and Maintenance. First International Workshop on TeleGeoProcessing, Lyon, France, Lyon, France - May 6-7, 1999 Proceedings edited by R. Laurini, pp. 103-111.

GIS Interoperability
 
 

After the Nourdine BADJI's PhD submitted in 1991, it became apparent that research has to be done for geographic distributed databases, especially for environmental planning. So, Robert LAURINI has initiated research in this domain, assisted by some Master students. One of the main issue was the solving the problem of semantic, topological and geometric continuity in zonal fragmentations in order to ensure GIS interoperability. During a few years, Robert LAURINI was a member of the Open GIS Consortium.

Following this action, the French research program on CITIES (ACI VILLES) has asked us to develop a system in order to ensure interoperability between urban data and models. This is the goal of Alain BECAM's PhD initiated in October 1998 and co-supervised with Maryvonne MIQUEL.

In autumn 2000, a new action was launched: Ahmed ARARA will design a complete telegeomonitoring for the surveillance of environment in a federated system. Emphasis will be given on the use of ontologies for implementing interoperability.

See a slideshow concerning some aspects of GIS federation.

Key papers in English:

R. Laurini Sharing Geographic Information in Distributed Databases 32nd Annual Conference URISA (Urban and Regional Information Systems Association) Milwaukee, August 7-11, 1994, pp. 441-455.

R. Laurini, F. Milleret-Raffort Distributed Geographical Databases: some Specific Problems and Solutions. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems. Las Vegas, October 5-8, 1994, pp. 276-283.

R. Laurini, Spatial Multidatabase Indexing and Topological Continuity of Fragmented Geographic Objects. Proceedings of the 9th ISCA International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems, September 25-27, 1996, Dijon, Edited by K. Yetongnon and S. Hariri, ISBN 1-880843-17-X, pp. 784-787.

R. Laurini (1998) Spatial Multidabase Topological Continuity and Indexing: a Step towards Seamless GIS Data Interoperability. In: International Journal of Geographical Information Sciences. Vol. 12,4, June 1998, pp. 373-402.

Groupware for Urban Planning

Within the European program COST, action UCE C4 (Urban Civil Engineering, Information Systems, Robert LAURINI has developed researches in clarifying the concept of groupware for urban planning. For that, he organized an international workshop in Lyon in February 1998, in connection NCGIA, Varenius action.

The best papers were published in the special issue on Groupware for Urban Planning, of Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Vol 22, Number 4, 1998.

See a Slideshow for a complete introduction to groupware and public participation in urban planning.

Key paper in English:

R. Laurini (1998) Groupware for Urban Planning: An Introduction. "Computers, Environment and Urban Systems", Vol 22,4 July 1988, pp. 317-333.

TOWNTOLOGY: Ontology for Urban Planning
 

The scope of the TOWNTOLOGY project is both to write a complete ontology for urban planners, and to provide visual tools in order to design this ontology. Presently its includes around 800 concepts especially for street planning and mobility. Then some other urban domains will be covered. This ontology is stored thanks to a special extension of XML allowing the storing of several definitions of the same concepts, multimedia illustrations and complete trackability both for concept definitions and relation assignments. See the TOWNTOLOGY website for more details.

The visual tools include a visual browser allowing to navigate directly on the semantic graph of the ontology, and a special visual editor. More a visual portal has been defined allowing accesses to the ontology via photographs. This work constitutes the PhD of Kader Keita.

In order to extend this ontology to various urban domains, a COST project was set under the responsibility of Jacques TELLER from the University of Liege, Belgium; it will begin in January 2005 under the number COST C21.

For an introduction to Urban Ontologies, see the tutorial I gave in October 2004, at the 24^th UDMS.

Key papers:

KEITA A., LAURINI R., ROUSSEY C., ZIMMERMAN M. (2004)"Towards an Ontology for Urban Planning: The Towntology Project". In CD-ROM Proceedings of the 24^th UDMS Symposium, Chioggia, October 27-29, 2004, pp 12.I.1

LAURINI R. (2007) "Pre-consensus Ontologies and Urban Databases", In "Ontologies for Urban Development", Edited by Jacques Teller, John R. Lee and Catherine Roussey , Springer Verlag, Studies in Computational Intelligence, 61,  pp. 27-36.

Real Time GIS (2003-now)
 

Now, a lot of data are measured by sensors. So, in GIS, it becomes important to define new structures able to deal with data coming from sensors and measured in real time. When there are a lot of sensors, it is important that the geographic database will be able to store adequately those data, avoiding queuing effects. Two actions are developped, (i) to define a database structure the main specifications of which will be to store data very rapidly avoiding queue and database saturation, and (ii) to develop new methods for testing the quality of data coming from sensors. For that two new data structures were implemented and tested, namely the po-tree and the pas-tree.

In 2005, it was decided to work on metadata for real time geographic database for Claudia-Catalina Gutiérrez-Rodriguez' PhD.

Key papers:

Automatic generation of chorem maps (2006-now)
 

Chorems are a schematic representation of a territory, invented by Pr. Brunet. Until now, there were designed manually. The goal of this project is to generate them automatically. This project is split into two parts. The first one, made in collaboration with México (Dr. Sol-Martínez, Tecnólogico de Monterrey, Campus de Puebla) is to design a system which starting from a geographic database runs spatial data mining procedures in order to find the more important and more relevant geographic patterns. The second part is starting from those geographic patterns to organize them, and to make the layout; this part in made in collaboration with the University of Salerno, Italy, and more precisely the team of  Dr. Giuliana Vitiello and Dr. Monica Sebillo.

Key papers:

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