Fire Models and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

(National Institute of Standards and Technology Fire Research Grant 60NANB11D173)

Fully embedding wfds-ls1 on desktop and mobile devices

Early in the project life cycle it was requested by fire modelers that GMS examine fully embedding WFDS-LS within a mobile environment.  The following key functional requirements for this mobile application were identified as follows:

? Visualizing shapefiles, ERDAS Imagine, GeoTiff, and web mapping services.

? Navigating and querying of data sources.

? Symbolizing shape and raster data sets by attribute values.

? Viewing cross sections of digital elevation models and other three-dimensional (3D) data sources.

? Visualizing 3D information overlaid with imagery.

? Adding multiple layers to the 3-D and profile views with ability to toggle the visibility of these layers.

? Editing and creating features.

? Saving workspaces for later use.

? Creating WFDS input files from input data over specified geographic extents.

? Viewing multiple WFDS simulation output files in the same view.

? Embedding WFDS-LS1 algorithms into application.

? Animating outputs from WFDS simulations.

? Zipping a project workspace for distribution to collaborators.

? Creating custom data collection schemes and sharing these amongst applications. Custom data collection schemes include the following:

o Single, Single Choice, Multi-Choice or Image Fields.
o Repeating, Optional and Visible Attribute Values.
o Attribute captions
o Saving, loading and sharing configurations.

Screen shots of the 2D, Profile, and Three-Dimensional (3-D) window of the mobile GIS-FMI (Fire Model Integrator) are shown in Figure 3 below.

   Figure 3.  Screen shots of key functional requirements found in the GIS-FMI mobile application developed for iPads.

The full testing and procedures utilized for fully integrating WFDS-LS1 into the prototype desktop application and GIS-FMI are described in this report.  The integration of WFDS-LS1 also occurred in the cross platform application.  GIS-FMI is available for download free of charge on the App Store.  This effort highlighted the possibility of implementing WFDS-LS1 as well as WFDS-LS2 in a mobile environment but speed of execution on a mobile device remains an issue.  Fully embedding WFDS-LS3 and WFDS-LS4 on a mobile device would be difficult if done outside of the FORTRAN development environment due to the complexity of the code base.