Multi-scale interactive maps such as Google Maps or OpenStreetMap have replaced paper topographic maps for most professional and daily uses. Past research told us how to design paper topographic maps at a given scale to make them readable and understandable by human users. But these rules/guidelines do not apply anymore, and map designers lack guidelines to make maps that are smooth to explore through scales, and it is common for a multi-scale map user to feel lost for a few seconds after a zooming interaction. The LostInZoom project (Not Getting Lost in Multi-Scale Maps: Exploring the Anchor Theory in Cartographic Zoom Interactions in the Context of Crisis Management) seeks to establish a new zooming paradigms for multi-scale maps, based on multi-scale visual landmarks that act as anchors during the zoom. To achieve this novel zooming paradigm, we need new grounding knowledge on how people perceive and understand interactive multi-scale maps, in order to design maps and interaction that make multi-scale explorations smoother. The LostInZoom project will be based on three main pillars. In the first one, we will explore the cognition of multi-scale interactive maps with an experimentation approach, in order to identify the anchors or landmarks that help a map reader locate himself when zooming. In the second pillar, we will design new cartographic generalisation techniques to derive multi-scale maps that magnify the landmarks that are important for multi-scale exploration. Finally, the third pillar will be dedicated to the design of new zooming interactions that focus on these landmarks to smooth even more the zooming exploration.

The COGIT laboratory of the French National Mapping Agency made research on generalisation to automate map making from geo data base. The solving method is based on Multi-agent paradigm and owns a large set of spatial analytical tools. These results should allow to characterise urban space at different levels and to study their morphometric dynamic. To reach this goal we should adapt and implement the vector agent principles and tools on our Open Source platform named GeOxygène and to enrich it with various methods conceived at the LIV and LSIIT laboratories during the FoDoMust project (ACI 'Masse de données' 200'-2007). In order to characterise urban space from remote sensing data, both laboratories have formalized geographical entities at various scales by means of 1/ a dictionary containing samples of identified objects and 2/ one ontology that describes the identifies phenomena. A set of segmentation and identification algorithms based on low level information (radiometry, texture) complete the proposed urban formalization. The experiments on the urban objects formalization at several scales would be reused in this project and adapted to the context of vector databases. The operational objective of this research project is to propose an Opensource platform for the analysis and the simulation of urban growth. This simulation can help to better describe the urban dynamic at a local level. More precisely, this project aims to ensure the transfer and the integration of analysis tools of the COGIT and the Strasbourg university laboratories into an open source GIS. This GIS will be based on the open source GeOxygene platform deposited by the COGIT laboratory in 2005. The project also aims to create a set of urban characterisation and simulation modules in vector mode which incorporate constraints related to the spatial environment and the public policy. At least the platform will be enriched by a friendly learning module adapted to the specific case of urban data. The learning tools will be used to enrich the ontology, the urban characterisation and to detect specific urban growth mechanism thanks to the existence of multi-temporal urban data sets. The project is composed of 4 scientific tasks and one organisational one (T0). Task 0 : Project management AIm : to organise technical meetings, to ensure the furniture of the different deliverables (report and implementation code) in time, to send the required information to the ANR, to share the results between partners and to organise an international workshop at the end of the project. Task 1: Develop GeOpenSim Aim : to conceive an Open Source urban simulated module on top of GeOxygène. This module will be based on vector agents that represent urban information depicted at different levels of details. The module will integrate analytical methods conceived in task 2 and a friendly learning module conceived in task 3. The simulated module will be evaluated and improved thanks to the results given by task 4. The modelling will include the representation of different kinds of agents, their aims, their behaviours and their interactions. Task 2: Formalisation and construction of urban objects. Aim: to propose an ontology of urban entities as well as a set of methods necessary for their detection, their characterisation and the identification of their spatial dynamic. The urban objects will be described at the micro and meso level (group level). The main detection and characterisation methods will be coded, tested and improved Task 3: Ontology improvement and conception of a learning module to characterise urban objects. Aim: Adapting classical learning methods for the detection and characterisation urban objects and to facilitate the use of such methods for non expert users. Then improving the ontology proposed in task 2 by means of the proposed learning tools applied on data base specifications and on the data themselves. Task 4: Validation by application study Aim: to test the module GeOpenSim by means of specific cases of urban growth analysis. This study will be done with urban research laboratories. This application will enlighten 1/ the appropriateness of the proposed agent modelling 2/ the completeness of the urban analytical tools, 3/ the flexibility of the system to integrate new and specific urban growth mechanism.

History of the French population and territory since the 18th century until now is quite well known at the department's and province's level. However, it is far less explored at the scale of the smallest administrative units, the communes, where the people have their everyday life. The reason for that lies in the bulk of data to be handled: for twenty or so provinces and regions or for a hundred departments, they are more than 40 000 communes appearing during the last two centuries and a similar number of parishes before the Revolution. The number of people in each commune has to be collected in the censuses; administrative borders of the communes which no more exist has to be drawn; places of economic, military and demographic interest indicated on the ancient maps have to be taken into account, geo-referenced and followed through the time. Only a precise knowledge of these elements can help understand how administrative units, local population growth and buildings of interest interact and as a consequence, help anticipate consequences of changes of the administrative grid as actually foreseen. The GeoPeuple project is intended to afford, from one hand, a technical tool to gather geo-referenced data at the local level using ancient maps an censuses, and on the other hand, to perform an historical analysis of the population at the local level in relation to the administrative structure and the characteristic elements of the physical and human landscape (roads, forests, marshes, factories, mills, fortifications...). The project is feasible because the three teams involved join their ability and their experience in their own field. The historical demography laboratory (LDH) at the EHESS has gathered demographic data since 1791 at the commune's level and is finishing estimating the border of disappeared communes. It has also rebuilt in raster mode the Cassini maps going back to the mid 18th century with the help of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The LDH will provide this raw material together with an interpretation of the results. The LIP6 of Paris 6 University is well known in IA techniques and image processing. Its task will be to build algorithms and software able to recognize and vectorise special items on the maps. These elaborated tools must have a degree of generality concerning the kind of maps so as to be used by the COGIT of the IGN specialized in computer geography which will follow the selected items from old map to current geo data base (RGE), elaborating rules of division of the territory and rules of change and also a system of geo-identifier taking into account the time. In this way, the COGIT will be at the center of the project, linking the software and algorithms elaborated by the LIP6, to the historical interpretation of the LDH. In this respect, the definition of the rules governing border, places, population, and their test using simulations will be strategic. Together with the LDH, the COGIT will popularize the results in an easily understandable way pointing in three directions. First, the government interested in knowing the conditions of stability of a new administrative grid will take advantage of the analysis of more than 10 000 communes’ fusions and fissions which occurred in the past. Second, the historians, geographers and demographers working on the territory will find data and tools aiming at identifying and gathering any symbol on the maps and relating it by georeference to the whole administrative grid as well as to local populations and other items present at a given time. Third, the common people will find some answers on how the french population occupied its territory at a fine level since more than two centuries and also a general view of how the major changes of population and administrative centers took place during the last 220 years.

More than 15,000 mountain rescue requests are recorded each year on the French territory. Despite the technological advances of positioning systems and the growing number of geo-applications, the location of the victims during the alert phase remains crucial to the rescue public services teams. Data heterogeneity, victim’s mountain poor knowledge and the imprecision of the travelled itinerary described by the victims are some factors that make this step difficult. The project CHOUCAS is an interdisciplinary project involving researchers from different domains such as data and knowledge management, retrieval information, spatial data reasoning, and spatial data visualization. The aim of the project, in response to the needs expressed by the Peloton de Gendarmerie de Haute-Montagne de Grenoble, is to propose: methods and tools to build and enhance spatial data coming from heterogeneous sources, fuzzy spatial reasoning models and methods, and geo-visualization tools to improve the decision making process regarding victims’ localisation in mountain areas.

The GEONTO project focuses on interoperability of diverse data related to geographic information. We particularly intend to facilitate applications dealing with such a diversity, from the integration of database schemas to the intuitive query of textual documents, being either technical or common documents. The project originates in the idea that each document has been developed according to a given point of view, which can be seen through the used vocabulary, and which can be more formally reflected in an ontology. Ontologies play a key role for integrating multiple and heterogeneous sources of information. They are formal references containing concepts commonly agreed in a given community. They may be used to describe and consistently integrate data. Because they are a set of reference concepts, they are an efficient gateway for the members of a given community when they attempt to access data annotated by the means of the ontology. Because they are formally expressed, they may be used for automating data integration. The first part of the project consists in building several geographic ontologies reflecting several points of view. In order to do that, several approaches relying on natural language processing techniques will be used. The first one will use lexico-syntactic techniques in order to analyse the textual specifications of several geographic databases produced by IGN-France: new ontologies will be built and existing one will be enriched. The second approach will analyse existing geographical texts of the public library "la médiathèque de Pau" with another technique looking for geographical names and typical words surrounding them. The second part of the project will study the alignment of ontologies built in the previous part. During the last years, many researches have been done for ontology alignment. The idea will be to use and extend them for our case. Several techniques will be used, from the comparison of words describing the concepts to instance matching. An important particularity of the work is to study how to align very heterogeneous ontologies in terms of quality, content or structure. Another important point is to go beyond the ontology alignment: we will develop a methodology to globally compare two ontologies and decide how much they reflect similar points of views, and thus how much they could be merged. The third and last part of the project will take advantage of the results of the first parts for some given applications. The first application is a portal for accessing to numerous textual geographic documents. Built and aligned ontologies will be used to better annotate, query and present the documents. The second application is the matching of diverse geographic database schemas. This task is very important for data users who intend to mix sources of knowledge and for data producers who need to maintain different databases. The difficulty of this task relies on the large heterogeneity of schemas. All the works of this project will be developed and tested on actual data. Real data in the geographic field, more particularly in the topographic domain, will be provided by the French national mapping agency and a public library in the town of Pau for experiments. In France, there are numerous and huge databases in this domain (about one hundred of giga-bytes).