ISPRS Wuhan 2009 Workshop

The ISPRS Wuhan Workshop 2009 " Virtual Changing Globe for Visualisation and Analysis" was hosted by the State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS), Wuhan University, from 27th to 28th October 2009. The workshop was co-organized by the ISPRS working groups WG IV/4 (Virtual Globes and Context-Aware Visualisation/Analysis) and WG VII/5 (Methods for Change Detection and Process Modelling).

Representatives in universities, research institutions, and private industry attended the workshop. Experts and scholars from China, USA, UK and other countries have delivered 4 keynotes, 18 oral presentations and related demonstrations.

In the opening ceremony of the workshop on 27 October, Prof. Chuangbing Zhou, the vice president of Wuhan University, Prof. Deren Li, the Chairman of the Academic Committee of LIESMARS, Prof. Ammatzia Peled, the Second Vice President of ISPRS, and Prof. Marguerite Madden, the president of ISPRS TC IV, delivered welcome addresses.

Prof. Deren Li gave the first keynote on "Towards a Geospatial Service Web." His talk provides envision of GSW, a geospatial infrastructure that makes all types of distributed geospatial resources Web discoverable, accessible, and "plug-and-play". It provides a framework towards an integrated seamless distributed Space-Earth system. The presentation outlined the mission of GSW, discussed the framework of GSW, and listed the service components in GSW, described the standards to support interoperability in GSW. And finally, the system architecture and recent development on the prototype system (i.e. GeoGlobe) for the implementation of GSW was presented.

Prof. John Townshend, University of Maryland at College Park, USA, explored the reason that why we can't establish the capability between land cover and land use information. And he also presented the ways in which obstacles may be overcome. The presentation illustrated by results from research directed towards the monitoring of forest cover globally at Landsat resolutions. The use of Virtual Globes as an organizing framework for operational monitoring also was discussed.

The third keynote was given by Dr. Vincent Tao from Microsoft Virtual Earth, about "Global Access of Local Knowledge". His presentation addressed the evolution of the virtual globe technology, in particular, presented the evolution of Microsoft Virtual Earth technology from its roadmap to technical architecture, infrastructure and operations. And then he discussed how Microsoft has taken steps to address these technical issues. He also presented real-world examples of Microsoft Virtual Earth applications for global based local search and knowledge discovery.

The last keynote was given by Mr. Patrick Hogan from NASA Ames Research Center, USA, about "Spatial Information Processing: Standard-based Open Source Visualization Technology - WORLD WIND Visualization Technology". In his interesting report, information security is a global issue that will increasingly affect our ability to survive as a species. Collectively we must better appreciate the complex relationships that make life on Earth possible. Providing spatial information in its native context can accelerate our ability to process that information. To maximize this ability to process information, three basic elements are required: data delivery (server technology), data access (client technology), and data processing (information intelligence). Patrick Hogan's presentation provided open source server and client technologies based on open standards. The possibilities for data processing and data sharing were enhanced by this open infrastructure for geographic information.

The main workshop consisted of a technical program of four oral sessions, focusing on Virtual Globe, Visualization and Analysis, Virtual Globe Case Studies, Spatio-Temporal Process Modeling and Methods of Change Detection.

In the first session, Prof. George Vosselman, from the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), The Netherlands, presented on how point cloud segmentations can be used to obtain 3D building models at various levels of detail based on a comparison of point clouds obtained from imagery and from laser scanners. Prof. Marguerite Madden addressed the Context-aware Analysis, Geovisualisation and Virtual Globes for Managing Earth Resources. And Prof. Peng Yue discussed the approaches for Integrating Virtual Globe and Web Service Technologies, thus providing an analysis-enhanced virtual globe for Higher-Education Teaching and Research.

The second session focused on the methods to realize a real space through Virtual Globe. Dr. Maged N. Kamel Boulos, University of Plymouth, UK, presented a new vision of emergency and public health situation rooms that leverage and harness the powers of the social Web ("Web 2.0"), the 3-D Web, and Internet GIS. He proposed to develop a 4-D GIS collaborative and interactive platform suited for emergency and disaster management in real-time, which marries virtual globes or 3-D mirror worlds and 3-D virtual worlds, and complements and tightly integrates them with other key technologies, e.g., real-time, geotagged RSS-Really Simple Syndication feedsand geo-mashups. In Cheng Jing's (Wuhan University) report, he proposed to organize the multi-scale 3D model data to meet network transmission through partitioning organization based on hierarchical quadtree structure.

Second day started with the Spatio-Temporal Process Modeling session. In this session, Dr. Chengquan Huang, University of Maryland at College Park, USA, proposed two automated approaches for deriving forest change products using Landsat images. The first approach uses Landsat time series stacks (LTSS) and a vegetation change tracker (VCT) algorithm by the acquisition date of the LTSS images. The second approach is association of a training data automation (TDA) method and support vector machines (SVM) algorithm.

In the last session, Prof. Qiming Zhou, Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China, give an interesting talk about" Modeling and Visualizing Spatio-temporal Patten of Land Cover Change in Pearl River Delta Region of China Using Multi-temporal Imagery". His report presented an efficient methodology to model and visualize spatio-temporal pattern of land cover change in the PRD region using multi-temporal satellite images. The classified satellite images were compared to detection the land cover change from other landuse to built-up areas. The trajectories of land cover change can then be established to model the change with the time.

At night we had a dinner to celebrate the successful workshop and were looking forwards the next ISPRS Workshop.