Tourism organizations have become one of the main users of the internet in recent years bysetting their own urban tourism websites. However, not all the websites are effective to promote their goals andobjectives. An effective evaluation of urban tourism websites can help organizations on how best to employ them.Using the ICTRT (Information, Communication, Transaction, Relationship and Technica...

A 1-D canopy interface model (CIM) has been developed recently and integrated in the meso-scale meteorological WRF v3.5 model in order to improve the surface representation. One of the objectives of such a model is to prepare for the coupling of micro-scale models with meso-scale models so as to improve building energy consumption estimates at the urban scale as well as improve meteorological v...

The ongoing urban transition toward decarbonized energy systems has raised the attention on local energy planning practices. Besides the multiple actors involved in the planning process, the complexity of the urban energy systems requires the elaboration of heterogeneous data. In such contest, the paper introduces and compares two GIS-based methodologies for supporting the spatial characterizat...

Recent challenges in the realm of urban studies concern better understanding of microclimatic conditions. Changes in urban climate affect cities at local and global scales, with consequences for human health, thermal comfort, building energy use, and anthropogenic emissions. The extent of these impacts may vary due to different morphologies and materials of the built environment. The present co...

A new methodology is proposed to couple a meteorological model with a building energy use model. The aim of such a coupling is to improve the boundary conditions of both models with no significant increase in computational time. In the present case, the Canopy Interface Model (CIM) is coupled with CitySim. CitySim provides the geometrical characteristics to CIM, which then calculates a high res...

in this paper, a new propagation model based on utd for multiple diffraction paths in cellular mobile radio communications in urban environments is proposed. moreover, the most rigorous novel utd-based expressions for multiple diffractions by buildings and excess path losses are d - rived and analyzed. for this purpose, building rows are supposed to have rectangular cross-sections with the same...

This research investigates the effect of urban design factors on summertime urban heat island (UHI) intensity. Ten high-rise residential quarters in the inner city of Shanghai were empirically investigated during mid July to mid August in 2008. On-site design variables were developed to quantify the thermal impacts from density, building layout and greenery. The design variables that weremeasur...

Amajor feature of China’s urban transformation has been the breakdown of the danwei system and the consequent efforts at community building. Since the early 1990s when a movement for neighbourhood-based community building was launched, different practices have appeared and the urban community has changed remarkably. Whilst a number of works have documented this transition, few revealed in suffi...

Building reconstruction is essential in applications such as urban planning, telecommunication network planning, flight simulation and vehicle navigation which are of increasing importance in urban areas. This paper introduces a new method for automated building reconstruction by fusing airborne optical data with LiDAR point clouds. The data consists of aerial digital imagery acquired with the ...

The increasing need and use of 3D GIS particularly in urban areas has produced growing attention on building reconstruction, which attempts to generate geometric and radiometric models of buildings usually from sensory data. The popular data used for building reconstruction are traditionally aerial or satellite images, more recently airborne LIDAR data, or the combination of these data. Extensi...