Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
(a)
(b)
FIGURE 4.8
Adding real-world road networks within virtual worlds and simulating the movement of
traffic. (a) User view of the world and (b) underlying road network which was imported from OpenStreetMap
(each car is an individual agent).
specific hardware and operating system vendor). In part, this was made possible by the high level of
maturity that Web technology and Web standards have reached (e.g. PHP, JavaScript and the repre-
sentational state transfer architecture). In the Web 2.0 world, software therefore became a service
delivered via the Internet rather than an installation media, and GIS software is no exception.
In conjunction with these developments, technologies and platforms that rely on the software
as a service (SaaS) have emerged and, with them, lightweight software applications or apps, which
provide the necessary user interaction for delivering a specific software service. Due to these char-
acteristics, apps have enjoyed tremendous popularity on mobile computing devices and in particular
smartphones. In the spirit of Web 2.0, apps are built around the user and user-provided data and
they leverage those data to increase the value of the service. A prominent example of such apps is
that of Waze, which provides navigation in real-time traffic from crowd-sourced information. As
can be seen in Figure 4.10a, Waze has a simple interface showing current traffic conditions that
