This thesis aims to define the concept of a marine cadastre through an analysis of institutional and legal aspects of Australia’s current marine based management system. It also aims to investigate the applicability of current legal, institutional and administrative land based spatial management arrangements, including the Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure (ASDI) and cadastre, to the administration of current spatial rights, restrictions and responsibilities in the marine environment. (For complete abstract open document)

The fragmentation of administrative boundaries is a serious problem in the analysis of social, environmental and economic data. This research focuses on the development of a coordinated approach to the design of administrative boundaries that endeavours to support accurate decision making. Around the world, administrative boundaries have been structured in an uncoordinated manner, limiting data exchange and integration between organisations. The solution proposed in this research adopts the hierarchical reorganisation of administrative boundaries to enhance data integration and data exchange within the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) framework.The SDI is an initiative intended to facilitate access to complete and consistent data sets. One of the most fundamental problems restricting the objectives of the SDI is the fragmentation of data between non-coterminous boundary systems. The majority of administrative boundaries have been constructed by individual agencies to meet individual needs. Examples of the proliferation of different boundary systems include postcodes, census-collector districts, health districts and police districts. Due to the lack of coordination between boundary systems, current technologies for analysing spatial data, such as geographic information systems (GIS), are not reaching their full potential. A review of the current literature reveals that, until now, little has been done to solve this problem.The prototype developed within this research provides a new mechanism for the design of administrative boundaries. The prototype incorporates two algorithms. These are based on HSR theory and administrative-agency constraints and are implemented within the GIS environment. Such an approach is an example of the potential that is available when we link spatial information theory with the SDI framework and disciplinary knowledge.

The process of decision making is best undertaken with the consideration of as much information as possible. One way to maximise the amount of information that is being used in the process is to use metadata engines. Metadata engines can be used to create virtual databases which are a collection of individual datasets located over a network. Virtual databases allow decisions to be made using data from many different data bases at many different locations on a network. They shield the user from this fact. From the users point of view they are only using data from the one location. This thesis investigates some of the concepts behind metadata engines for Internet based Spatial Data Infrastructures. The thesis has a particular emphasis on how metadata engines can be used to create virtual databases that could be of use in the planning and decision making processes. The thesis also investigates some current spatial data technologies such as SDIs, data warehouses, data marts and clearing houses, their interoperability and their relationship to metadata engines. It also explores some of the more recent spatial data applications that have been developed in the context of metadata engines and Spatial Data Infrastructures.

Cartography is the science and art of making maps and thematic cartography is a subsection that deals with the production of thematic maps. A thematic map portrays the distribution of features, incidents or classifications related to a specific topic. With the rapidly increasing volumes of data, thematic maps allow users to efficiently analyse data and identify trends quicker. A spatial data infrastructure (SDI) focuses on making data available and ensures data interoperability through a geoportal and associated web services for discovery, display, editing, and analysis. Implementations of web service standards by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and the ISO/TC211, Geographic information/Geomatics enable the display, query and custom visualisation of spatial data in a geoportal. In the past, sophisticated cartographic methods have been mainly available on desktop applications, but with the advances in web mapping technology these methods have become increasingly popular on the Web. Currently, producing thematic maps using web services is a manual process that requires quite a lot of custom programming. The orchestrations of standard web services automate the process to produce thematic maps in a geoportal. It is preferable to use standard web services as opposed to customised programming; the standards provide flexibility, interoperability, and standard protocols, to name a few benefits. The goal of this research was to determine how standard OGC web services could be orchestrated to produce thematic maps within the geoportal of an SDI. To achieve this goal, an orchestrated thematic web service, named ThematicWS, was constructed from existing implementations of individual standard OGC web services, which are monolithic and interchangeable. The thematic cartographic process for producing choropleth and proportional symbol maps was investigated to model the process and obtain a set of steps. Experiments were performed to determine which existing web service standards could be used in the process. ThematicWS was developed using existing implementations of the following standards: WFS to retrieve the attribute data, WPS for the wrapping of custom functionalities (statistical processing and SLD generation), and a WMS to produce the thematic map image. The 52° North and ZOO project frameworks’ orchestration capabilities were evaluated for to determine the suitability for producing thematic maps. The evaluation showed that orchestration is possible in both frameworks. However, there are limitations in both frameworks for automatic orchestration such as the lack of semantic information and poor usability of the framework. The use of WPS services to wrap custom functionalities and to provide a standard interface has proved to be useful for the orchestration of standard web services. ThematicWS was successfully implemented based on standard web service implementations using both workflow scripting and workflow modelling. The orchestrated ThematicWS can be called and consumed by a geoportal of an SDI to produce thematic maps according to user defined parameters. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology / Unrestricted

The web has evolved to be the primary carrier of human knowledge during the information age. The ephemeral nature of much web content makes web knowledge preservation vital in preserving human knowledge and memories. Web archives are created to preserve the current web and make it available for future reuse. A growing number of web archive initia- tives are actively engaging in web archiving activities. Web archiving standards like WARC, for formatted storage, have been established to standardize the preservation of web archive data. In addition to its preservation purpose, web archive data is also used as a source for research and for lost information recovery. However, the reuse of web archive data is inherently challenging because of the scale of data size and requirements of big data tools to serve and analyze web archive data efficiently. In this research, we propose to build web archive infrastructure that can support efficient and scalable web archive reuse with big data formats like Parquet, enabling more efficient quantitative data analysis and browsing services. Upon the Hadoop big data processing platform with components like Apache Spark and HBase, we propose to replace the WARC (web archive) data format with a columnar data format Parquet to facilitate more efficient reuse. Such a columnar data format can provide the same features as WARC for long-term preservation. In addition, the columnar data format introduces the potential for better com- putational efficiency and data reuse flexibility. The experiments show that this proposed design can significantly improve quantitative data analysis tasks for common web archive data usage. This design can also serve web archive data for a web browsing service. Unlike the conventional web hosting design for large data, this design primarily works on top of the raw large data in file systems to provide a hybrid environment around web archive reuse. In addition to the standard web archive data, we also integrate Twitter data into our design as part of web archive resources. Twitter is a prominent source of data for researchers in a vari- ety of fields and an integral element of the web's history. However, Twitter data is typically collected through non-standardized tools for different collections. We aggregate the Twitter data from different sources and integrate it into the suggested design for reuse. We are able to greatly increase the processing performance of workloads around social media data by overcoming the data loading bottleneck with a web-archive-like Parquet data format. / Doctor of Philosophy / The web has evolved to be the primary carrier of human knowledge during the information age. The ephemeral nature of much web content makes web knowledge preservation vital in preserving human knowledge and memories. Web archives are created to preserve the current web and make it available for future reuse. In addition to its preservation purpose, web archive data is also used as a source for research and for lost information discovery. However, the reuse of web archive data is inherently challenging because of the scale of data size and requirements of big data tools to serve and analyze web archive data efficiently. In this research, we propose to build a web archive big data processing infrastructure that can support efficient and scalable web archive reuse like quantitative data analysis and browsing services. We adopt industry frameworks and tools to establish a platform that can provide high-performance computation for web archive initiatives and users. We propose to convert the standard web archive data file format to a columnar data format for efficient future reuse. Our experiments show that our proposed design can significantly improve quantitative data analysis tasks for common web archive data usage. Our design can also serve an efficient web browsing service without adopting a sophisticated web hosting architecture. In addition to the standard web archive data, we also integrate Twitter data into our design as a unique web archive resource. Twitter is a prominent source of data for researchers in a variety of fields and an integral element of the web's history. We aggregate the Twitter data from different sources and integrate it into the suggested design for reuse. We are able to greatly increase the processing performance of workloads around social media data by overcoming the data loading bottleneck with a web-archive-like Parquet data format.

The INSPIRE initiative requires that every European member state establishes a national SDI and related web services. Among these a WFS must be implemented to query spatial data. Therefore several Quality of Service specifications must be fullled by this web service, among these are performance, capacity and availability. In this study work a WFS will be implemented for Nature SDI plus. In this European project the WFS will provide spatial data from several data specications of ANNEX I and III. The main object is to test the conformance to the INSPIRE specification. Therefore load and performance tests will be performed.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of West Florida, 2009. / Submitted to the Dept. of Computer Science. Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 45 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

In the past decade efforts to develop spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) have migrated from the initial “top-down” national approaches to “bottom-up” and cross jurisdictional efforts at the sub-national level. Although national SDI developments are fundamental to building the SDI culture and policy, it is sub-national and local SDI development that will deliver the immediate benefits to citizens and the community. In countries which have highly decentralised federations of states such as Australia, United States and Canada, the challenge is how to co-ordinate the literally thousands of often small local government jurisdictions which are important contributors to state and local SDIs. In recent years, a number of co-operative spatial data sharing partnerships between local and state government have emerged in various countries around the world. These partnerships are relatively new initiatives that have been established to facilitate more effective sharing of spatial data between organisations, but also as a mechanism to contribute to SDI development. To maximise the benefits from these partnerships it is essential to understand the factors that contribute to their successful operation and sustainability. Therefore, the focus of this research is to understand these collaborative arrangements so that future data sharing initiatives can be improved and sustained.

The development of a Regional Spatial Data Infrastructure (Regional SDI) is much more challenging than the development of a National SDI initiative within a nation. This is mainly because of the voluntary nature of cooperation at a multi-national level and participation in a Regional SDI initiative. As a result, despite considerable interest and activities, the development of an effective and comprehensive Asia-Pacific Regional Spatial Data Infrastructure (APSDI) is hampered by a lack of support from member nations which results in this initiative remaining only an innovative concept. Based on this situation, the aim of this research is to design an improved conceptual model for Regional SDI and an implementation strategy. It is proposed that this problem can be partly addressed by increasing the level of awareness about the nature and value of SDIs; improving the SDI conceptual model to better meet the needs of nations; and by identifying key factors that facilitate development by better understanding the complexity of the interaction between social, economic and political issues.

Geographic data is a hallowed element within the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) discipline. As geographic data faces increased usage in distributed and mobile environments, the ability to access and maintain that data can become challenging. Traditional methods of data management through the use of file storage, databases, and data catalog software are valuable in their ability to organize data, but provide little information about how the data was collected, how often the data is updated, and what value the data holds for an organization. By defining geographic data as an asset it becomes a valuable resource that requires acquisition, maintenance and sometimes retirement during its lifetime. To further understand why geographic data is different than other types of data, we must look at the many components of geographic data and specifically how that data is gathered and organized. To best align geographic data to the asset management discipline, this thesis will focus on six key dimensions, established through the work of Vanier (2000, 2001), which seek to evaluate asset management systems. Using a conceptual narrative linked to an environmental analysis case study, this research seeks to inform as to the strategies for efficiently managing geospatial data resources. These resources gain value through the context applied by the inclusion of a standard structure and methodologies from the asset management field. The result of this thesis is the determination of the extent to which geographic data can be considered an asset, what asset management strategies are applicable to geographic data, and what are the requirements for geographic data asset management systems.