WP5. Characterisation of sound environments

The objective of the WP5 will consist in producing advanced noise maps, offering a better understanding of urban sound environment compared with mapping of classical noise indicators. Soundscape models that rely on automatic identification of scenes and sources will be proposed, in order to propose better acoustic models of outdoor soundscape quality. To the best of our knowledge, automatic inference of the soundscape quality is made in the literature by considering various statistics of pressure measurement. However, the very nature of the sound events are mandatory in order to better predict the soundscape quality from the audio, as for a human the qualitative aspect of the perceived sound greatly influences the overall quality. Based on recent studies in the field of Audio Event Detection (AED), these models will make it possible to predict the outdoor sound quality from the sensor recordings. 

WP4. Data assimilation and network optimisation

This task aims to produce the best estimations of outdoor noise levels that can be derived from both numerical simulations, as generated in WP2, and observations from the monitoring network deployed in WP3. In other words, this task will merge simulations and observations in order to generate noise maps that are as close as possible to the “real” (in situ) noise levels. Scientific developments proposed in this WP on data assimilation, provide a major break, and represent an important originality, since such approach has never been used on the environmental noise context.

This work will include uncertainty quantification for the resulting estimations. The estimations will be in the form of noise maps with the same high spatial resolution as simulations. The minimum target is hourly noise maps, either for typical days (weekday, Saturday, Sunday, holidays) or for every single day within the experiment period. The proposed methods will be compatible with operational use, especially in terms of computational burden. Also, the task will perform the optimization of the sensor network in order for the resulting maps to be as accurate as possible. Since data assimilation for accurate monitoring of noise pollution is a new topic, different solutions should be investigated, by increasing the corresponding approach complexity.

WP6. Integrative GIS platform

The objective of the WP6 is to develop an Integrative Geographical Information System Platform (IGISP) to facilitate data accessibility, its reuse and its exploitation to build new thematic maps. The IGISP implements the SDI concepts. The data formats and the data flows (raw or graphic representations) will be managed by open data standards.

The platform is organized around two components.

A single geospatial database aggregating all produced data. Data are heterogeneous, quantitative or qualitative. They are coming from different spatial and temporal scales and from various origins: measurements from in situ sensors, traffic data, survey, simulations, and computation of indicators. This geospatial database will driven by the Postgresql Relational Database Management Systems (RDDMS), extended with the PostGIS extension.

A map services application to diffuse thematic maps via the Internet using the standard WMS (Web Map Services). A particular attention will be paid on the cartographic Style Layer Descriptor. By experimenting a new cartographic server on the OrbisGIS platform, it will demonstrate how it is important to have syntactic portrayal interoperability operational with a mature open specification able to standardize the symbology code (map results). Since the current Symbology Encoding standard does offer limited capabilities for describing cartographic symbolizations (i.e. poor quality maps). Some recommendations will be proposed to improve this situation through more capabilities to customize the map symbology. Good practices will also describe to favour adoption of standards. Such propositions should lead to full cartographic portrayal interoperability, going further then basic styles to display the extra-noise indicators as accessibility (closest quiet zone…), exposure reduction tools (lowest sound exposure path) for the population, or other experimental indicators, like the Harmonica index developed in a EU Life project.