A prototype system for the digital lodgement of spatial data

This dissertation develops the model of a prototype system for the digital lodgement of spatial data sets with statutory bodies responsible for the registration and approval of land related actions under the Torrens Title system. Spatial data pertain to the location of geographical entities together with their spatial dimensions and are classified as point, line, area or surface. This dissertation deals with a sub-set of spatial data, land boundary data that result from the activities performed by surveying and mapping organisations for the development of land parcels. The prototype system has been developed, utilising an event-driven paradigm for the user-interface, to exploit the potential of digital spatial data being generated from the utilisation of electronic techniques. The system provides for the creation of a digital model of the cadastral network and dependent data sets for an area of interest from hard copy records. This initial model is calibrated on registered control and updated by field survey to produce an amended model. The field-calibrated model then is electronically validated to ensure it complies with standards of format and content. The prototype system was designed specifically to create a database of land boundary data for subsequent retrieval by land professionals for surveying, mapping and related activities. Data extracted from this database are utilised for subsequent field survey operations without the need to create an initial digital model of an area of interest. Statistical reporting of differences resulting when subsequent initial and calibrated models are compared, replaces the traditional checking operations of spatial data performed by a land registry office. Digital lodgement of survey data is fundamental to the creation of the database of accurate land boundary data. This creation of the database is fundamental also to the efficient integration of accurate spatial data about land being generated by modem technology such as global positioning systems, and remote sensing and imaging, with land boundary information and other information held in Government databases. The prototype system developed provides for the delivery of accurate, digital land boundary data for the land registration process to ensure the continued maintenance of the integrity of the cadastre. Such data should meet also the more general and encompassing requirements of, and prove to be of tangible, longer term benefit to the developing, electronic land information industry.

Digital constitutionalism and the role of the rule of law in the governance of virtual communities

This project proposes a new conceptual framework for the regulation of social networks and virtual communities. By applying a model based upon the rule of law, this thesis addresses the growing tensions that revolve around the public use of private networks. This research examines the shortcomings of traditional contractual governance models and cyberlaw theory and provides a reconstituted approach that will allow public constitutional-type interests to be recognised in the interpretation and enforcement of contractual doctrine.

Model interoperability in building information modelling

The exchange of design models in the design and construction industry is evolving away from 2-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) and paper towards semantically-rich 3-dimensional digital models. This approach, known as Building Information Modelling (BIM), is anticipated to become the primary means of information exchange between the various parties involved in construction projects. From a technical perspective, the domain represents an interesting study in model-based interoperability, since the models are large and complex, and the industry is one in which collaboration is a vital part of business. In this paper, we present our experiences with issues of model-based interoperability in exchanging building information models between various tools, and in implementing tools which consume BIM models, particularly using the industry standard IFC data modelling format. We report on the successes and challenges in these endeavours, as the industry endeavours to move further towards fully digitised information exchange.

Creativity, knowledge, engagement : keys to finding the right governance model for a regional community precinct

This paper investigates the Cooroy Mill community precinct (Sunshine Coast, Queensland), as a case study, seeking to understand the way local dynamics interplay and work with the community strengths to build a governance model of best fit. As we move to an age of ubiquitous computing and creative economies, the definition of public place and its governance take on new dimensions, which – while often utilizing models of the past – will need to acknowledge and change to the direction of the future. This paper considers a newly developed community precinct that has been built on three key principles: to foster creative expression with new media, to establish a knowledge economy in a regional area, and to subscribe to principles of community engagement. The study involved qualitative interviews with key stakeholders and a review of common practice models of governance along a spectrum from community control to state control. The paper concludes with a call for governance structures that are locally situated and tailored, inclusive, engaging, dynamic and flexible in order to build community capacity, encourage creativity, and build knowledge economies within emerging digital media cityscapes.

China's Creative Industries : Copyright, Social Network Markets and the Business of Culture in a Digital Age

China’s Creative Industries explores the role of new technologies, globalization and higher levels of connectivity in re-defining relationships between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ in 21st century China. The evolution of new business models, the impact of state regulation, the rise of entrepreneurial consumers and the role of intellectual property rights are traced through China’s film, music and fashion industries. The book argues that social network markets, consumer entrepreneurship and business model evolution are driving forces in the production and commercialization of cultural commodities. In doing so it raises important questions about copyright’s role in the business of culture, particularly in a digital age.

What learners "know" through digital media production : learning by design

The power to influence others in ever-expanding social networks in the new knowledge economy is tied to capabilities with digital media production that require increased technological knowledge. This article draws on research in elementary classrooms to examine the repertoires of cross-disciplinary knowledge that literacy learners need to produce innovative digital media via the “social web”. The article builds on Learning by Design and the Knowledge Processes to describe “how” learning occurs, while presenting a model to theorise “what” students know – the Knowledge Assets – when learners produce digital and multimodal texts.

Digital modelling for sustainability

Digital modelling tools are the next generation of computer aided design (CAD) tools for the construction industry. They allow a designer to build a virtual model of the building project before the building is constructed. This supports a whole range of analysis, and the identification and resolution of problems before they arise on-site, in ways that were previously not feasible.

Design of a model-generated repository as a service for USDL

SAP and its research partners have been developing a lan- guage for describing details of Services from various view- points called the Unified Service Description Language (USDL). At the time of writing, version 3.0 describes technical implementation aspects of services, as well as stakeholders, pricing, lifecycle, and availability. Work is also underway to address other business and legal aspects of services. This language is designed to be used in service portfolio management, with a repository of service descriptions being available to various stakeholders in an organisation to allow for service prioritisation, development, deployment and lifecycle management. The structure of the USDL metadata is specified using an object-oriented metamodel that conforms to UML, MOF and EMF Ecore. As such it is amenable to code gener-ation for implementations of repositories that store service description instances. Although Web services toolkits can be used to make these programming language objects available as a set of Web services, the practicalities of writing dis- tributed clients against over one hundred class definitions, containing several hundred attributes, will make for very large WSDL interfaces and highly inefficient “chatty” implementations. This paper gives the high-level design for a completely model-generated repository for any version of USDL (or any other data-only metamodel), which uses the Eclipse Modelling Framework’s Java code generation, along with several open source plugins to create a robust, transactional repository running in a Java application with a relational datastore. However, the repository exposes a generated WSDL interface at a coarse granularity, suitable for distributed client code and user-interface creation. It uses heuristics to drive code generation to bridge between the Web service and EMF granularities.

Sharing with Creative Commons : a business model for content creators

Creative Commons (CC) is often seen as a social movement, dismissed by critics as a tool for hobbyists or academics who do not sell their creations to make a living. However, this paper argues that the licensing of creative copyright works under a CC licence does not preclude commercial gain. If used wisely, CC licences can be a useful tool for creators in their quest for commercial success. In particular, this paper argues that the sharing of creative works online under a CC licence allows creators to circumvent traditional distribution channels dominated by content intermediaries, whilst maintaining a level of control over their copyright works (i.e. explicitly reserving some rights but not all rights). This will be illustrated by case studies on how CC is being used by content creators and intermediaries respectively, and how successful their respective methods are in harnessing this tool.

The 3D model of l(IT)eracy and the English curriculum

The field of literacy studies has always been challenged by the changing technologies that humans have used to express, represent and communicate their feelings, ideas, understandings and knowledge. However, while the written word has remained central to literacy processes over a long period, it is generally accepted that there have been significant changes to what constitutes ‘literate’ practice. In particular, the status of the printed word has been challenged by the increasing dominance of the image, along with the multimodal meaning-making systems facilitated by digital media. For example, Gunther Kress and other members of the New London Group have argued that the second half of the twentieth century saw a significant cultural shift from the linguistic to the visual as the dominant semiotic mode. This in turn, they suggest, was accompanied by a cultural shift ‘from page to screen’ as a dominant space of representation (e.g. Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Kress, 2003; New London Group, 1996). In a similar vein, Bill Green has noted that we have witnessed a shift from the regime of the print apparatus to a regime of the digital electronic apparatus (Lankshear, Snyder and Green, 2000). For these reasons, the field of literacy education has been challenged to find new ways to conceptualise what is meant by ‘literacy’ in the twenty first century and to rethink the conditions under which children might best be taught to be fully literate so that they can operate with agency in today’s world.

Five senses digital stories

These digital stories were produced during a commercial research project with SLQ and Flying Arts. The works build on the research of Klaebe and Burgess related to variable workshop scenarios, and the institutional contexts of co-creative media. In this instance, research focused on the distributed digital storytelling workshop model; and the development of audiences for digital storytelling. The research team worked with regional artists whose work had been selected for inclusion in the Five Senses exhibition held at the State Library of Queensland to produce stories about their work; these works were then in turn integrated into the physical exhibition space. Location remoteness and timeline were factors in how the stories were made in a mix of individual meetings and remote correspondence (email &phone).

A subject-specific model of human buttocks and thighs in a seated posture

Finite element analyses of the human body in seated postures requires digital models capable of providing accurate and precise prediction of the tissue-level response of the body in the seated posture. To achieve such models, the human anatomy must be represented with high fidelity. This information can readily be defined using medical imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) or Computed Tomography (CT). Current practices for constructing digital human models, based on the magnetic resonance (MR) images, in a lying down (supine) posture have reduced the error in the geometric representation of human anatomy relative to reconstructions based on data from cadaveric studies. Nonetheless, the significant differences between seated and supine postures in segment orientation, soft-tissue deformation and soft tissue strain create a need for data obtained in postures more similar to the application posture. In this study, we present a novel method for creating digital human models based on seated MR data. An adult-male volunteer was scanned in a simulated driving posture using a FONAR 0.6T upright MRI scanner with a T1 scanning protocol. To compensate for unavoidable image distortion near the edges of the study, images of the same anatomical structures were obtained in transverse and sagittal planes. Combinations of transverse and sagittal images were used to reconstruct the major anatomical features from the buttocks through the knees, including bone, muscle and fat tissue perimeters, using Solidworks® software. For each MR image, B-splines were created as contours for the anatomical structures of interest, and LOFT commands were used to interpolate between the generated Bsplines. The reconstruction of the pelvis, from MR data, was enhanced by the use of a template model generated in previous work CT images. A non-rigid registration algorithm was used to fit the pelvis template into the MR data. Additionally, MR image processing was conducted to both the left and the right sides of the model due to the intended asymmetric posture of the volunteer during the MR measurements. The presented subject-specific, three-dimensional model of the buttocks and thighs will add value to optimisation cycles in automotive seat development when used in simulating human interaction with automotive seats.

Interfacing Jack and anybody : towards anthropometric musculoskeletal digital human modeling

Virtual prototyping emerges as a new technology to replace existing physical prototypes for product evaluation, which are costly and time consuming to manufacture. Virtualization technology allows engineers and ergonomists to perform virtual builds and different ergonomic analyses on a product. Digital Human Modelling (DHM) software packages such as Siemens Jack, often integrate with CAD systems to provide a virtual environment which allows investigation of operator and product compatibility. Although the integration between DHM and CAD systems allows for the ergonomic analysis of anthropometric design, human musculoskeletal, multi-body modelling software packages such as the AnyBody Modelling System (AMS) are required to support physiologic design. They provide muscular force analysis, estimate human musculoskeletal strain and help address human comfort assessment. However, the independent characteristics of the modelling systems Jack and AMS constrain engineers and ergonomists in conducting a complete ergonomic analysis. AMS is a stand alone programming system without a capability to integrate into CAD environments. Jack is providing CAD integrated human-in-the-loop capability, but without considering musculoskeletal activity. Consequently, engineers and ergonomists need to perform many redundant tasks during product and process design. Besides, the existing biomechanical model in AMS uses a simplified estimation of body proportions, based on a segment mass ratio derived scaling approach. This is insufficient to represent user populations anthropometrically correct in AMS. In addition, sub-models are derived from different sources of morphologic data and are therefore anthropometrically inconsistent. Therefore, an interface between the biomechanical AMS and the virtual human model Jack was developed to integrate a musculoskeletal simulation with Jack posture modeling. This interface provides direct data exchange between the two man-models, based on a consistent data structure and common body model. The study assesses kinematic and biomechanical model characteristics of Jack and AMS, and defines an appropriate biomechanical model. The information content for interfacing the two systems is defined and a protocol is identified. The interface program is developed and implemented through Tcl and Jack-script(Python), and interacts with the AMS console application to operate AMS procedures.

A comprehensive literature review of the pelvis and the lower extremity digital human models under quasi-static conditions

Finite Element Modeling (FEM) has become a vital tool in the automotive design and development processes. FEM of the human body is a technique capable of estimating parameters that are difficult to measure in experimental studies with the human body segments being modeled as complex and dynamic entities. Several studies have been dedicated to attain close-to-real FEMs of the human body (Pankoke and Siefert 2007; Amann, Huschenbeth et al. 2009; ESI 2010). The aim of this paper is to identify and appraise the state of-the art models of the human body which incorporate detailed pelvis and/or lower extremity models. Six databases and search engines were used to obtain literature, and the search was limited to studies published in English since 2000. The initial search results identified 636 pelvis-related papers, 834 buttocks-related papers, 505 thigh-related papers, 927 femur-related papers, 2039 knee-related papers, 655 shank-related papers, 292 tibia-related papers, 110 fibula-related papers, 644 ankle related papers, and 5660 foot-related papers. A refined search returned 100 pelvis-related papers, 45 buttocks related papers, 65 thigh-related papers, 162 femur-related papers, 195 kneerelated papers, 37 shank-related papers, 80 tibia-related papers, 30 fibula-related papers and 102 ankle-related papers and 246 foot-related papers. The refined literature list was further restricted by appraisal against a modified LOW appraisal criteria. Studies with unclear methodologies, with a focus on populations with pathology or with sport related dynamic motion modeling were excluded. The final literature list included fifteen models and each was assessed against the percentile the model represents, the gender the model was based on, the human body segment/segments included in the model, the sample size used to develop the model, the source of geometric/anthropometric values used to develop the model, the posture the model represents and the finite element solver used for the model. The results of this literature review provide indication of bias in the available models towards 50th percentile male modeling with a notable concentration on the pelvis, femur and buttocks segments.