MENTORS: Runar Bergheim, Karel Charvat, Raitis Berzins

Collaborative analysis for smart farming

The MapWhiteboard is used as an add-on to an application that performs automatic zoning of agricultural fields based on remote sensing data. The application takes as input a field, automatically acquires satellite imagery time series data, calculates indices such as the NVDI and uses the resulting 4D data to determine zones in the respective field that should be treated differently with respect to fertilisation, irrigation and pesticide application.

The MapWhiteboard component adds value to this scenario in two ways:

• Users can indicate points that reside within distinct areas of the field
• Users can modify the resulting zones after auto-classification
• Users can add recommendations, rates to the individual zones

Integrated planning tool

The Map Whiteboard is used as a component supporting collaborative planning processes that involve regional sector authorities, local authorities/municipalities and stakeholders in the planning processes from business/industry/real-estate and NGOs/civil society/organisations.

The traditional planning process requires these stakeholders to work together either separately or, traditionally, in meetings. Much of the interaction concerns maps where people with varying experience in interpreting maps and spatial data work together in meeting rooms on big screens or hunched above printed maps laid out on a table.

The MapWhiteboard augments the meeting experience, allows people to see exactly what is referred to and can add contextual information to better understand exact locations. A person inexperienced in GIS concepts can see the map as if it was Google Maps, can switch to satellite/aerial imagery background and make simple annotations. A more technical user may add WMS services and other contextual information. All can see each other’s pointers.

Generic meeting augmentation tool

Inspired by tools like menti.com which provides polling functions to ensure participative conferences and miro.com which offers a comprehensive digital whiteboard functionality, the MapWhiteboard is in this case used to bring up a map of anywhere on the globe and allow users to cooperate on the surface by drawing and annotating.

After the meeting is ended, the annotations must be saveable, archived for future reference or for export into GIS tools or other visualization solutions.

Ambition of the challenge

Enhancements to Map Whiteboard based technology

• API documentation for both WebSockets and REST API
• Generic authentication options for APIs
• Stability
• Error tolerance
• Reconnect on disconnect
• Race conditions between edits
• Generic plugin for OpenLayers based applications
  • Decouple, loosen the demo application from the client-side library and server API
• Packaging of server application
  • Installation instructions Windows, Linux
  • Deployment

Next steps

• Start a large scale practical deployment of solution.
• Integration with teleconference technologies
• Integration with Hub4Everybody

The registration for the challenges is open! Register for this hackathon challenge HERE.