1,720,968 research outputs found
Building integrated vegetation effect on micro-climate conditions for urban heat island adaptation. Lesson learned from Turin and Rome case studies
Full text linkThe proposed study investigates the effect of urban heat island mitigation scenarios by applying extensive green roofs, green façades, and living walls to two built areas within Turin and Rome, Italy. Three mitigation scenarios and a baseline one have been developed in ENVI-met software for each built area and run for a typical winter day, summer day, and summer day with a heat wave. The simulation results show that building integrated vegetation technology-application on a single building has an irrelevant effect on local temperatures; contrariwise, building integrated vegetation technology-wide application can effectively mitigate urban warming. Furthermore, the effect of green roofs and green walls on urban temperature is negligible in winter, likely because of the limited plant activity and the reduced amount of incoming solar radiation. Results also show that green façades are more effective than green roofs in mitigating pedestrian-level air temperature when installed on high-rise buildings, and green walls are more beneficial in mitigating summer urban heat island when installed in canyons parallel to wind direction than in perpendicular ones. Depending on the mitigation scenario, average decreases in urban temperatures up to 1 °C can be reached in the whole selected built area, alleviating urban warming
Representing Topological Relationships by Using 3D Objects: an Empirical Survey
No full textIn this paper we present a survey conducted in order to understand how simple 3D objects, named geometaphors, can be composed for building a model that permits to represent topological relationships in a 3D space. The research was conducted on twenty participants who were familiar with geographical information systems (GIS) and the notion of topological relationship.
The subjects participating to the survey were asked to put in relation textual labels related to topological relationships with visual compositions of geometaphors pairs. The result is an interpretation model of the visual compositions that represents an important component for the building of visual query environments compliant with the users’ mental model, contributing therefore to augment significantly the usability of such systems
A usability-driven approach to the development of a 3D web-GIS environment
No full textThe main goal of this work is to provide an advanced visual environment where users that are not skilled for what concerns the computer science domain may compose queries related to those geographical phenomena for which the third dimension is a relevant feature. Visual queries are composed in a 3D environment accessible from the web where the users manipulate geographical objects, called 3D geometaphors. The geometaphors represent the operands of an underlying algebra characterized by a set of topological, directional and metrical operators; such operators are expressed in the query environment in terms of visual relationships between the geographical objects. The introduction of the third dimension for querying the geographical databases has challenged the authors with a number of important issues related to the area of visualization, navigation and object manipulation. According to the principles of usability engineering, the authors have built different prototypes based on a client-server architecture that have been iteratively evaluated by experts and final users in order to discover drawbacks and to improve the quality of the proposal. The result is a coordinated user-friendly 3D visual metaphor for querying GIS on the web, where all the elements needed for composing a query have a visual, easy to understand, counterpart
Effect of green wall installation on urban heat island and building energy use: A climate-informed systematic literature review
No full textUrban Heat Island (UHI) is a worldwide threat affecting building energy demand, public health, and energy security. Green wall deployment can simultaneously positively impact UHI and building energy demand depending on climate zones. According to the different climate zones worldwide, the present systematic literature review (SLR) investigates the direct effects of green wall installation on building energy use and UHI. 1325 articles were screened, and 51, corresponding to 647 case studies, were selected after removing those with methodological or statistical heterogeneity. The effects of green wall deployment have been explored according to cooling and heating season, weather conditions, daytime, nighttime, green wall typology, green wall orientation, and application scale. The performed analyses show that green walls: (1) can reduce heating and cooling building energy demand up to 16.5% and ∼51%, respectively, and mitigate UHI up to ∼5 °C in all the investigated climate zones; (2) can decrease to the greatest extent building energy needs when applied in low-density urban contexts where they can be installed on the entire building. Besides, when applied to a single façade, South orientation should be preferred in most climate zones to maximize building energy saving; (3) have the best UHI mitigating potential—up to 8 °C—in highly urbanized areas featured with narrow streets surrounded by high-rising buildings. Altogether, green walls are a fit-all solution to reduce building energy demand and mitigate UHI, providing healthier living conditions. However, further research is necessary to include quantifiable and unquantifiable effects omitted in the current study
Guaranteeing Integrity Constraints during Interactive Map Editing with Visual Language Parsing
No full textWebMGISQL 3D – Iterating the Design Process Passing through a Usability Study
No full textA spatial query language, useful to querying spatial databases and retrieving spatial information, becomes efficient, effective and pleasant-to-use only if its surrounding environment is able to provide unskilled users with immediate and comprehensive access to the supplied visual operations. In this paper we describe how a usability evaluation process has been applied to improve the interface of the visual environment WebMGISQL 3D, a web application for querying and retrieving spatial information, with special focus on those phenomena where the third dimension is a relevant feature
Assessing building energy performance and energy policy impact through the combined analysis of EPC data – The Italian case study of SIAPE
Full text linkEnergy Performance Certificates (EPCs) and EPC digital registers are key tools to evaluate different aspects of the building stock and its energy consumption. This paper presents several detailed energy performance evaluations on the Italian buildings based on a sample of over 2,000,000 EPCs extracted from the national EPC register (SIAPE), contributing to the definition of an updated energy performance baseline of the Italian building stock. This is the first work using the Italian EPC register to define such a baseline to the extent of the authors’ knowledge. Furthermore, combined analyses of EPC data were carried out to obtain information on the influence of the Italian energy regulations on building characteristics and on the effectiveness of energy strategy application for building renovation. This study underlines the relevance of EPC registers and how the combined analysis of EPC parameters can provide a large amount of useful information on several aspects of the building stock, allowing the monitoring of the impact of the Italian energy policy framework on buildings energy performance. Finally, based on these results, the paper supports public authorities and decision-makers in planning and developing future energy programs and identifying the best practices on the Italian territory
The use of GIS for environmental data menagement in the Department of Environmental Sciences (SECOND UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES, Italy)
No full textCompliance to eXtreme Apprenticeship in a programming course: Performance, achievement emotions, and self-efficacy
No full textWe investigated the efficacy of using the eXtreme Apprenticeship (XA) methodology for teaching programming courses at the university by consid-ering an often-neglected aspect: students’ achievement emotions in XA tasks. We involved 53 university students who participated in a XA-based programming course. We assessed students’ performance in the course, their achievement emotions and self-efficacy. Key results of the study are pre-sented in the paper. Students with a higher compliance towards the course performed better and were characterised by less intense anxiety, anger, and hopelessness compared to those with a lower compliance. Among achieve-ment emotions, only shame mediated the relation between self-efficacy and performance. Such findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical and applied relevance
Gamified children universities: An exploratory study
No full textChildren universities see universities hosting activities for exposing children to research findings. However, universities are not per-se designed for children. This paper advances the idea of gamifying university contexts for children in order to provide them with a positive engaging experience. The reported qualitative study serves as proof-of-concept. Engagement results, albeit preliminary, are positive
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