Understanding and Managing Our Earth through Integrated Use and Analysis of Geo-Information

Abstract

All things in our world are related to some location in space and time, and according to Tobler’s first law of geography “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” [1]. Since humans exist they have been contemplating about space and time and have tried to depict and manage the geographic space they live in. We know graphic representations of the land from various regions of the world dating back several thousands of years. The processing and analysis of spatial data has a long history in the disciplines that deal with spatial data such as geography, surveying engineering, cartography, photogrammetry, and remote sensing. Until recently, all these activities have been analog in nature; only since the invention of the computer in the second half of the 20th century and the use of computers for the acquisition, storage, analysis, and display of spatial data starting in the 1960s we speak of geo-information and geo-information systems. [...]