Compressing web Geodata for real-time environmental applications

The advent of connected mobile devices has caused an unprecedented availability of geo-referenced user-generated content, which can be exploited for environment monitoring. In particular, Augmented Reality (AR) mobile applications can be designed to enable citizens collect observations, by overlaying relevant meta-data on their current view. This class of applications rely on multiple meta-data, which must be properly compressed for transmission and real-time usage. This paper presents a two-stage approach for the compression of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data and geographic entities for a mountain environment monitoring mobile AR application. The proposed method is generic and could be applied to other types of geographical data.