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This work aims at developing guidelines and methods for establishing urban hazard information infrastructure (UHII) for the City of Windhoek (CoW) in Namibia, to set up an institutional and technical framework for spatial data exchange and sharing in development control and hazard management. An analysis of UHII requirements in the Twente Fire Brigades (The Netherlands) was first conducted and the Spatial Information Management Reference Model (RSIMM) was created. RSIMM was used as a reference to the Case‐Specific Spatial Information Management Model (CSIMM) for the CoW, where young institutions face financial, structural, legal and technical uncertainties. The new methodology to introduce UHII to the CoW was developed using combined soft and structured system development methods. The policies and strategies supporting UHII development were identified. The Urban Hazard and Emergency Management Information System (UHEMIS) development was chosen to initiate UHII introduction creating data and metadata management base for decision making in spatial development control, risk assessment and emergency response planning. The UHII and UHEMIS models are being designed next in this on‐going research.

The Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) is a major new collaborative socio‐economic research programme involving five higher education institutions in Wales. This paper introduces the work of the WISERD data integration team and describes their plans for the development of an online geo‐portal. Their aim is to support WISERD researchers by providing a framework for integrating, managing and disseminating quantitative and qualitative socio‐economic data in Wales. This paper outlines the goals of this major project, discusses the concept of the WISERD geo‐portal and reports on initial investigations into geo‐portal development using free and open‐source (FOSS) software. The paper concludes with a brief summary of the future work of the WISERD data integration team.

Global climate can be defined as the average of all the regional trends of weather over a long time period (National Science Foundation [NSF], 2009). The researchers all over the world have concluded that the Earth's climate is changing as a whole. There are basically two factors that have impacts on the climate, the natural (climatic and environmental variability) and the anthropogenic (infrastructure development and land use land cover change). The causes of past changes are believed to be related to changes in ocean currents, solar activity, volcanic eruptions, and other natural factors (ISDR, 2008). But in recent times, human activities have accelerated this rate of climate change (IPCC, 2007; Sperling & Szekely, 2005; ISDR, 2008). As the developmental activities increase, the amount of emission of greenhouse gasses and aerosols increases, which, in turn, leads to global warming and snow melting, thus increasing the sea level and the frequency and intensity of cyclones, floods, droughts, and many other disasters (IPCC, 2001).

This article aims to describe how information and communications technology (ICT) has introduced a new approach in the handling of spatial data and related services and how Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, one of the Italian local governments, has been involved in an interesting growth that adopts ICT to provide spatial data and related services to itself and to its territory.

This article considers three aspects data and services interoperability and the implications of spatial data delivered through a multi-channel environment; the use of social web as a platform for volunteered geographical information in the public administration environment; and the application of mobile technologies.

The article represents the summary of recent activities in the Sardinia region and may constitute a paradigmatic example for other realities.

The research and activities conducted represent a point of view advanced and innovative in the field of territorial sciences and spatial planning on a regional scale.

Spatially enabled taxation systems provide public policy makers in Australia with a conundrum. For the Valuers General who provide the fiscal cadastre for the taxation system, spatial enablement could lead to a central role in State Government taxation or to a sidelined role. This paper aims to address this issue.

The paper uses a survey of Valuers General.

The paper establishes the current extent of adoption of spatially enabled taxation systems, identifies current provision and uses of valuation data and explores possible future provision and uses of such data.

The sample size for survey may limit its use elsewhere.

The paper concludes that further integration and a unified national policy approach would be preferable.

The first published paper to establish the current extent of adoption of spatially enabled taxation systems and to identify current provision and uses of valuation data in Australasia.

Fog computing (FC) is a new field of research and has emerged as a complement to the cloud, which can mitigate the problems inherent to the cloud computing (CC) and internet of things (IoT) model such as unreliable latency, bandwidth constraints, security and mobility. Because there is no comprehensive study on the FC in health management processing systems techniques, this paper aims at surveying and analyzing the existing techniques systematically as well as offering some suggestions for upcoming works.

The paper complies with the methodological requirements of systematic literature reviews (SLR). The present paper investigates the newest systems and studies their practical techniques in detail. The applications of FC in health management systems have been categorized into three major groups, including review articles, data analysis, frameworks and models mechanisms.

The results have indicated that despite the popularity of FC as having real-time processing, low latency, dynamic configuration, scalability, low reaction time (less than a second), high bandwidth, battery life and network traffic, a few issues remain unanswered, such as security. The most recent research has focused on improvements in remote monitoring of the patients, such as less latency and rapid response. Also, the results have shown the application of qualitative methodology and case study in the use of FC in health management systems. While FC studies are growing in the clinical field, CC studies are decreasing.

This study aims to be comprehensive, but there are some limitations. This research has only surveyed the articles that are mined, according to a keyword exploration of FC health, FC health care, FC health big data and FC health management system. Fog-based applications in the health management system may not be published with determined keywords. Moreover, the publications written in non-English languages have been ignored. Some important research studies may be printed in a language other than English.

The results of this survey will be valuable for academicians, and these can provide visions into future research areas in this domain. This survey helps the hospitals and related industries to identify FC needs. Moreover, the disadvantages and advantages of the above systems have been studied, and their key issues have been emphasized to develop a more effective FC in health management processing mechanisms over IoT in the future.

Previous literature review studies in the field of SLR have used a simple literature review to find the tasks and challenges in the field. In this study, for the first time, the FC in health management processing systems is applied in a systematic review focused on the mediating role of the IoT and thereby provides a novel contribution. An SLR is conducted to find more specific answers to the proposed research questions. SLR helps to reduce implicit researcher bias. Through the adoption of broad search strategies, predefined search strings and uniform inclusion and exclusion criteria, SLR effectively forces researchers to search for studies beyond their subject areas and networks.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate web services (in the form of parameterised URLs), specifically in the context of the ScotlandsPlaces project. This involves cross‐domain querying, data retrieval and display via the development of a bespoke XML standard rather than existing XML formats and mapping between them.

In looking at the different heritage domain datasets as well as the metadata formats used for storage and data exchange, the ScotlandsPlaces XML format is revealed as the most appropriate for this type of project. The nature of the project itself and the need for dynamic web services are in turn explored.

It was found that, due to the nature of the project, the combination of a bespoke ScotlandsPlaces XML format and a set of matching web services was the best choice in terms of the retrieval of different domain datasets, as well as the desired extensible nature of the project.

It may have proven useful to investigate the datasets of more ScotlandsPlaces partners, but as yet only a limited number of first phase partners' datasets could be studied, as the second phase of the project has yet to begin.

Rather than an information portal, the ScotlandsPlaces web site aggregates disparate types of record, whether site records, archival or otherwise, into a single web site and makes these records discoverable via geographical searching. Aggregated data are accessed through web service queries (using a bespoke XML format developed specifically for the project for data return) and allow partner organisations to add their datasets regardless of the organisational domain. The service also allows spatially referenced records to be plotted on to a geo‐browser via a KML file, which in turn lets users evaluate the results based on geographical location.

The purpose of this paper is to address the challenge for knowledge exchange between disciplines that study past urban landscapes, such as archaeologists, historians and historical geographers and disciplines that work on new urban landscapes such as architects and spatial planners. It presents the design, deployment and evaluation of a heritage instrument, the “digital cultural biography” (DCB), which aims to allow future-oriented disciplines to make more historical and heritage informed decisions.

The paper makes three contributions. First it presents a methodology to disseminate geographic information across disciplines by applying the biography of the landscape research strategy. Second it translates this methodology to a digital instrument, the DCB, which makes it possible to configure the historical and heritage features diachronically as well as spatially. And third it evaluates the added value of this instrument by organizing a design concourse and applying various evaluation methods. The Roman neighbourhood of Testaccio functions as the use case for this study.

The research shows a high potential to use digital tooling based on geospatial technologies to support the dialogue between future and past-oriented disciplines.

The paper discusses how the recently developed biography of the landscape method can be used as a tool for collaboration between heritage managers and spatial planners. Moreover, for the first time it applies and evaluates digital tools and geospatial technologies to support this approach.