Greece

Although, the underwater environment is of great scientific interest regarding all fields of marine research, it has not been exploited broadly yet for cultural and tourism purposes. At the same time, technology in the fields of virtual and augmented reality has undergone considerable development by providing technical solutions for environments that their modelling has been problematic or non-operational for a variety of spatial scales. To this end, we report on our recent progress in developing an integrated interactive framework for exploring natural (augmented reality) and virtual (virtual reality) environments in regions of touristic and environmental interest (eg. Submerged cities, shipwrecks, sunken harbors and diving parks, marine parks etc.) in order to enrich travel experience and promote specific and diverse forms of tourism. In particular, the designed solution combines high-resolution data acquired and processed with state-of-the-art technologies (swath mapping systems, underwater vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles) so as to create a synthetic topographic relief basemap and to analyze all its particular geomorphological and ecological structures as well as anthropogenic interventions. Moreover, through a set of special designed tools for multimedia content management, it is possible to write narrative scenarios and produce interactive experiences in virtual reality. In this way, users are able to assimilate to real (or even imaginary) environments through different media (e.g., tablets, virtual reality glasses, etc.). The integration of research knowledge into interactive narrative systems will furthermore result into the development of innovative research and teaching products to promote the complex, challenging, magnificent underwater environment and also to attract tourists of general or special interest. The developed digital platform, named VIRTUALDIVER, will enable users to navigate virtually in environments accessible only by underwater vehicles and in cost-intensive, research and scientific missions and make known the underwater cultural heritage.

GISTAM 2020

An Innovative Platform for Virtual Underwater Experiences Targeting the Cultural and Tourism Industries

Welcome! This event, hosted by UC Online, is an all-campus virtual conference. We are convening UC faculty, students, staff, administrators, and other stakeholders throughout the system to explore innovations, advancements, and transformations in digital learning environments.
 
 The conference will focus on emerging tools, technology, accessibility, and teaching and learning methodologies at UC, in alignment with equity and inclusion. Keynote speeches, panel discussions, demonstrations, live-interactive sessions along with opportunities for socializing will provide multiple opportunities for attendees. The sessions will highlight past, present, and future accomplishments and challenges in online and digital environments. 
 
 Thank you, in advance, for your interest in and continued support of UC Online.
 
 We look forward to sharing two days with you.
 
 
 Best, 
 Ellen Osmundson, Ph.D.
 Program Director
 UC Online 


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Digital Transformation of UC: The Next Chapter

UC Online will host a virtual conference to convene UC faculty, students, staff, administrators and other stakeholders throughout the system to explore innovations, advancements and transformations in digital environments.

keynote

The International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management aims at creating a meeting point of researchers and practitioners that address new challenges in geo-spatial data sensing, observation, representation, processing, visualization, sharing and managing, in all aspects concerning both information communication and technologies (ICT) as well as management information systems and knowledge-based systems.

User generated content from the Web has over the last years increasingly become an important data source for humanitarian aid. In that context volunteered geographic information (VGI) is of gaining in relevance for humanitarian aid and disaster response. Especially OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a successful global project adding all kinds of spatial data to an open database that can be used for multiple purposes, e.g. in particular to assist humanitarian aid and support reaching the broader SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). Example applications include accessibility analysis & disaster routing for humanitarian aid with Openrouteservice.org, the global climate protection map (Klimaschutzkarte.de) for raising awareness about sustainable living or OSMlanduse.org for data on landuse to name a few. In all of these applications the currentness and general fitness for purpose of the data is of high concern.
But because of the volunteered type of contributions, the quality of the data generated needs always to be investigated. The last years have seen quite some research on the development of intrinsic data quality indicators for OSM in order to supplement conventional extrinsic quality assessment methods. The latter rely on additional authoritative or ground truth data which is often not available, esp. in less developed countries or for very specific information needs in disaster management. But only a few of those intrisic VGI quality analysis measures and methods have been integrated into an open toolbox and framework yet. Current work aims at better assessing the fitness for purpose of the OSM data for specific application domains, esp. for humanitarian aid & disaster response. I wil introduce the OSM History Analytics platform ohsome.org which aims at providing means of analyzing contributions to OSM over time since the beginning of the project in 2004 in an open & reproducible way on a global scale based on big data technologies and cloud infrastructures. Further research tries to develop deep learning methods to automatically improve OSM using remote sensing images in combination with data from mobile humanitarian crowdsourcing apps like MapSwipe.org. This shows also that methods from remote sensing, GIScience and general computer science are more and more converging and are being combined for developing meaningful workflows. In the talk I will discuss the current status, future potential and issues of those developments.

Leveraging User Generated Geoinformation for Humanitarian Aid: Potentials and Challenges

Since the end of 1977, when I have been asked to write my dissertation on the then emergent spatial information technology, I have followed the most astonishing technical development of Geographic Information Systems and the inclusion of spatial information technology in nearly all forms of IT: spatial database technology, GPS, the web, mobile smart phones, ... In summary: ubiquitous computing and connectivity.
Roughly every 10 years, I have published on trends in GIS technologies and wondered often what makes a technology to become a smashing commercial successes: Google maps perhaps the most spectacular, but by far not the only one.
The talk will discuss briefly the technology advances accumulated the past 40 years responsible for the current commercial successes and when and why they became successes. I will mention a few instructive failures and generalize the social, economical and technical preconditions for commercial success.
My experience leads me to believe that success is possible as a combination of three points:
- firstly, a fundamental human need is at the core - e.g. people need to navigate in the world and must avoid to get lost;
- secondly, a cost-effective technical mean to satisfy this need is available and,
- thirdly, a business-opportunity is identified.
For example, computer mapping was available since early 1990, but became dominant only when the technical solution combining GPS with smartphones were widely available and "payment" by clients accepting advertisement a sufficient form of compensation for the service.
The conclusion describes a few technologies which I assume could be ready for the commercial limelight, and review critically the extrapolations in the experience of the disruption of the economic situation by the corona-virus epidemic which demonstrates some of the drawbacks of monopoly solutions.

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