Design Of Geographic Information System Research Articles

GIS Maps to Communicate Emergency Preparedness: How Useable Are They for Inner City Residents?

Despite the growing popularity of Geographic Information System (GIS) information maps as a public health tool, there are no published studies of low-average and low literacy adults’ abilities to read and use GIS information presenting emergency preparedness information. We hypothesized that GIS maps are hard to read for at least the 50% of adults in the US reading at 8th grade level or lower (Kirsch et al., 1993). Using a current GIS map used in New York City’s Office of Emergency Management Storm Surge Report researchers conducted interviews with 178 English and Spanish speaking residents of East and Central Harlem. Findings reveal that a majority of adults who have not completed high school could not read and use the maps for basic and vital information, including identifying if they lived in a hurricane evacuation zone, and locating where the nearest evacuation center to their home was. This study concludes there is a real and dangerous gap between the language and design of GIS and the abilities of millions of adults to interpret and use this information as currently presented.

Visualizing and Analyzing Activities in an Integrated Space-Time Environment

An integrated space-time environment is demanded by activity-based travel studies to facilitate the investigation of spatial and temporal characteristics of activities. The current geographic information system (GIS), which has been successful in supporting trip-based travel analysis, does not include an explicit time representation and therefore is incapable of supporting activity-based travel analysis efficiently. This study proposes a temporal GIS design that incorporates the space-time path concept of Hägerstrand's time geography to facilitate the analysis of activities in a space-time context. The space-time path concept provides an efficient approach to organizing activities and travels in their space-time contexts and to supporting the investigation of spatiotemporal relationships between individuals. This study adopts the three-dimensional orthogonal space-time system in the temporal GIS design and develops representation and analysis functions related to space-time paths and individual activities. The proposed design is successfully implemented in a prototype system. The system provides an integrated space-time environment to effectively visualize activities and travels in their space-time contexts and analyze their spatiotemporal characteristics. Such a system offers useful tools to facilitate activity-based travel studies.

Spatio-temporal GIS Design for Exploring Interactions of Human Activities

An effective representation of human activities in geographic information systems (GIS) presents a challenging research topic. Recent developments of information and communication technologies (ICT), which enable a virtual space and allow people to interact with others remotely, make such efforts even more difficult. This paper first extends the space–time path concept of Hägerstrand's time geography to represent both physical and virtual activities in a space–time context. A spatio-temporal GIS design which can accommodate the extended space–time path concept is proposed to support the exploration of spatio-temporal patterns of human interactions in physical and virtual spaces. Using time as a linear referencing system, a temporal dynamic segmentation method was developed to dynamically locate physical and virtual activities on space–time paths. The GIS design supports the identification of four different spatio-temporal patterns (i.e., co-existence, co-location in space, co-location in time, and no co-location in either space or time) of human interactions through their space–time paths. Using a hypothetical activity dataset, a prototype system is implemented as a three-dimensional GIS (i.e., two-dimensional space + one-dimensional time) in ArcGIS. The prototype system demonstrates the feasibility and potential of applying spatio-temporal GIS concepts to extend Hagerstrand's time–geographic framework for the representation and analysis of human interactions in both physical and virtual spaces. The proposed GIS design can be useful in such applications as understanding traffic congestion, tracking terrorist activities, and modeling the spread of infectious diseases.

Architecture design of grid GIS and its applications on image processing based on LAN

Computer technology and its relative subjects developed at very high speed in recent years, so is geo-information science, including Geographic Information System (GIS), remote sensing (RS) and global position system (GPS). But with the increase of data, many data cannot be used efficiently because of the tremendous amount of data and information and the difficulty of process and transfer through network. So how to develop internet technology to solve these problems becomes a difficult problem for current computer experts and geo-science experts. Fortunately, grid computing provides us the method to solve this problem effectively. Grid computing is a resources sharing model presented by computer experts to solve current network resources imbalance problem. Basing on the application of grid computing on geographical information system (GIS), this paper analyzes the weakness and problems of traditional GIS, and then gives the method to solve these problems with the technology provided by grid computing and web services. After analyzing the characteristic of grid computing this paper expatiates on current application status of grid computing on GIS and the problems it faces, with the technology of middleware, this paper presents the architecture of grid GIS and lists the techniques it needs. In conclusion, this paper concludes that the distributing middleware architecture based on grid geographic markup language (GridGML) and web services technique is a good solution to current problems, this architecture can also solve those problems such as effective resources sharing through internet and advancing international application's efficiency, at last we discuss its implementation process based on LAN.

A GIS for irrigation management

This work describes the development, operational functionalities and spatial modeling applications of a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based irrigation management system, to be used by irrigation consortia and local governmental institutions. The system provides tools for the exploration of spatially-referenced databases relevant for irrigation and the evaluation of irrigation scenarios under different soil, climatic and management conditions. The irrigation water management system makes use of ArcView GIS and the Avenue programming language for customization of GIS applications and design of new tools for modeling irrigation water requirements and identifying of areas with water deficit. Irrigation requirements can be estimated taking into account different scenarios of cropping pattern, climatic conditions (from dry to wet year), applied irrigation method, volume of water available for irrigation and hydraulic characteristics of the water distribution system. The irrigation water management system runs on different scales of both irrigation (from irrigation field to irrigation consortia) and administrative (from municipality to region) units. The integration of spatial climatic and soil data is based on the “false-raster” format, a vector layer composed of regular square grid cells. The size of simulation units is a function of the surface area under consideration which means that the exploration of GIS database and development of irrigation scenarios provide more detailed data at field and municipality scale and less number of information at consortia and regional scales. An example of operational functionality of the GIS-based irrigation water management system is given for the Apulia region, in Southern Italy.

Abstraction and decomposition in interoperable GIS

With the advent of distributed computing and the increasing trend towards the reuse of geographical data, a new generation of geographical information systems (GIS) is currently being specified. The key characteristics of these interoperable GIS are modularity and extensibility, and they are composed of existing software systems such as database management systems, traditional GIS, statistics packages and simulation models. (We use the terms interoperable GIS and open GIS interchangeably, however Open GIS is a trademark of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC)). They can be defined in terms of generic frameworks, which facilitates both information exchange between participating systems and the addition of new functionalities. Even though the idea of defining open GIS is not new, it is crucial that the steps necessary to design such a complex system be clearly decomposed. In this paper, we propose a layer decomposition for the design of an open GIS. Each layer corresponds to a different level of abstraction, starting with the application or user level down to the invocation of systems services. In addition, each such level can be specified by the same set of concepts: operation, data and session (ODS concepts). Orthogonally, the metadata needed for the interaction between levels is indispensable to achieve openness. The declarative style of specifying both user interaction and implementation on different levels of abstraction facilitates the incorporation of new software components. Therefore, the framework introduced in this paper supports the design and the evolution of interoperable GIS.

Geographic information system design for network equilibrium-based travel demand models

Travel demand analyses are useful for transportation planning and policy development in a study area. However, travel demand modeling faces two obstacles. First, standard practice solves the four travel components (trip generation, trip distribution, modal split and network assignment) in a sequential manner. This can result in inconsistencies and non-convergence. Second, the data required are often complex and difficult to manage. Recent advances in formal methods for network equilibrium-based travel demand modeling and computational platforms for spatial data handling can overcome these obstacles. In this paper we report on the development of a prototype geographic information system (GIS) design to support network equilibrium-based travel demand models. The GIS design has several key features, including: (i) realistic representation of the multimodal transportation network, (ii) increased likelihood of database integrity after updates, (iii) effective user interfaces, and (iv) efficient implementation of network equilibrium solution algorithms.

Experiential and Formal Models of Geographic Space

In this paper human experience and perception of phenomena and relations in space are studied. This focus is in contrast to previous work where space and spatial relations were examined as objective phenomena of the world. This study leads in turn to a goal: to identify models of space that can be used both in cognitive science and in the design and implementation of geographic information systems (GISs). Experiential models of the world are based on sensorimotor and visual experiences with environments, and form in individual minds, as the associated bodies and senses experience their worlds. Formal models consist of axioms expressed in a formal language, together with mathematical rules to infer conclusions from these axioms. In this paper we will review both types of models, considering each to be an abstraction of the same ‘real world’. The review of experiential models is based primarily on recent developments in cognitive science, expounded by Rosch, Johnson, Talmy, and especially Lakoff. In these models it is suggested that perception and cognition are driven by image-schemata and other mental models, often language-based. Cross-cultural variations are admitted and even emphasized. The ways in which people interact with small-scale (‘tabletop’) spaces filled with everyday objects are in sharp contrast to the ways in which they experience geographic (large-scale) spaces during wayfinding and other spatial activities. We then address the issue of the ‘objective’ geometry of geographic space. If objectivity is defined by measurement, this leads to a surveyor's view and a near-Euclidean geometry. These models are then related to issues in the design of GISs. To be implemented on digital computers, geometric concepts and models must be formalized. The idea of a formal geometry of natural language is discussed and some aspects of it are presented. Formalizing the links between cognitive categories and models on the one hand and between geometry and computer representations on the other are key elements in the research agenda.

The development of an interactive multi-scale GIS

This paper presents the development of the first geographical information system (GIS) that may be used to manipulate a single dataset at a very large range of scales (different detail levels). The design of this multi-scale GIS is fully integrated in the open DBMS Postgres and the open GIS GEO++. Besides the system design, this paper also gives details of the implementation in the Postgres DBMS environment of three generalization tools: 1. the BLG-tree for line and area simplification, 2. the Reactive-tree for selection based on importance and location, and 3. the GAP-tree for solving problems when using the other two structures for an area partitioning. -from Authors

Functional visual programming interface to geographical information systems

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are now widely used for the manipulation of spatial data. Clear limitations in the design of GIS for the user are identified, notably the limited knowledge represented within the systems, the time and difficulty involved in becoming a competent user and, in many cases, the low-level nature of the commands. One of the principal requirements of a more knowledgable GIS involves the representation of knowledge related to a number of features: the data in the system; the operations that can be performed; the processing of requests; and the presentation of results. Many of the ideas presented can be generally applied to other query language driven systems. The approach taken to the design and implementation of a prototype high-level interface to GIS is based on the functional style of programming. Functional languages appear to offer some important properties, for example: the strong and polymorphic typing and the ease with which new types can be defined; the ability to order the knowledge base within functions; and the facility to create functional hierarchies composed of compound or higher-order functions which allow high-level operations to be manipulated as units. It is described how a functional solution to the problems can be represented by a command based approach and how this can be improved upon through the use of a graphical user interface with direct manipulation of objects/icons.

Extending Geographic Information Systems for Risk Analysis and Management

A new kind of Geographic Information System (GIS) and computer support is required for risk analysis and management. Assessment of risk is emerging as important in many areas of planning, engineering, environmental and emergency management. Existing commercial GISs, provide some useful basic means of organizing and displaying spatial information, yet they are particularly inadequate for generating risk simulations – a task essential for risk management. The central problem is the commercial GIS has limited facilities to deal with uncertainty, modelling and simulation. The requirements for GIS risk modelling, functionality, access and design considerations are reviewed.SUMMARYExisting GIS has not been developed to work with uncertainty yet uncertainty is inherent in risk applications. Current risk analysis applications which stem from a scientific expert view lead to dispute and lack of confidence amongst policy makers and the public. It is essential that a new kind of GIS be developed to facilitate consensus building in all aspects of risk assessment and management. The new system (Risk GIS) should ‘know about’ the appropriate environmental information and process sources, should have a tool set to access, store and communicate information between diverse interest areas and should support easy development of alternate views of the possible evolution of classes of risk or specific risks and, secondly, scenarios of risk evolution and mitigation based upon documented assumptions and expressions of uncertainty. Without doubt this is a significant challenge to the GIS industry and, particularly, to risk research scientists who wish to develop a suitable integrated Risk GIS.

Category Theory and the Structure of Features in Geographic Information Systems

This paper explores feature-based approaches to geographic information systems (GISs) and develops a conceptual framework that can be used as a base for structuring geographic entities as features. The concepts are drawn from set theory, cognitive category theory, and cartographic principles of abstraction and generalization. Set theory provides an analytical approach to determining geographic features, an example of which is multispectral classification. This approach is limited when applied to geomorphologic phenomena such as hills and valleys, but cognitive category theory with the development of prototype concepts is applicable in this instance. Cartographic abstraction principles recognize the dependence of map features on purpose and scale. Combining set theory, cognitive category theory, and cartographic abstraction principles yields a base for the development of application-specific and resolution-dependent geographic features for use in GISs. The conclusion that features must subscribe to cognitive category theory and represent basic level geographic entities is supported from cartography by the common entities, such as roads and streams, that are symbolized on maps. The modeling concepts presented provide a basis for design and construction of a feature-based GIS, independent of the underlying geometric model, but dependent on application and resolution.

Geographic Information Systems for Urban Applications: Problems and Solutions

Geographic information systems (GIS) are designed as general-purpose systems to manage spatial information. They are similar to commercial database management systems except for their strong spatial context. This recent technology has inspired many users who have, for generations, been faced with the difficult task of making decisions based on spatial information. The development, design, and functions of GIS are reviewed. Then effectiveness of contemporary GIS in managing spatial information in an urban environment is evaluated. In particular, special problems caused by high data density and multilayer organisation are examined. A solution to these problems demands special display, database query, and data-organisation components of a GIS. An application using CARIS (Computer Aided Resource Information System), a GIS developed in Fredericton, New Brunswick, is presented. This application illustrates the concept of a multilayered GIS with which databases of progressive detail can be vertically linked to facilitate data query. (Author/TRRL)

Adaptation of Geographic Information Systems to Highway Management

The advent of geographic information systems (GIS) has created a technology with considerable potential for achieving dramatic gains in efficiency and productivity for a multitude of traditional and innovative highway management applications. However, to capitalize on GIS technology, it will be necessary for highway agencies to adapt the way in which they collect, store, and utilize data, as well as undergo fundamental changes in how they carry out technical responsibilities. This paper addresses these considerations through a study of: (1) highway management applications that can benefit from adaptation to GIS; (2) key GIS concepts affecting highway transportation; and (3) issues affecting GIS design and implementation within and between highway agencies. The results of this study are reported in terms of establishing guidelines for successfully achieving full GIS adaptation to highway management.

The current state and the main trends in the development of geographical information systems in the U.S.S.R.

Abstract The paper falls into two parts. The approach to geographical information systems (GIS) in the U.S.S.R. and differences in terminology are first discussed. The main part of the paper comprises case studies on the design, construction and use of GIS and of computer-assisted cartography in the U.S.S.R. to illustrate the transition to the introduction of automated technologies to processing of geographical data for science, practice and education, the diversity of contexts, the problems tackled and their departmental attribution, and the territorial span, functional capabilities and technological equipment. The following trends of these developments are identified: the design of integrated GIS, an increase in their capabilities for modelling, the introduction of elements of expert systems, an orientation towards microcomputer technology, an awareness of the need to use standardized hardware and software (including linguistic terms) and a greater interest in the commercial and legal problems of GIS, international collaboration and education.

Requirements and principles for the implementation and construction of large-scale geographic information systems

This paper provides a brief survey of the history, structure and functions of 'traditional' geographic information systems (GIS), and then suggests a set of requirements that large-scale GIS should satisfy, together with a set of principles for their satisfaction. These principles, which include the systematic application of techniques from several subfields of computer science to the design and implementation of GIS and the integration of techniques from computer vision and image processing into standard GIS technology, are discussed in some detail. In particular, the paper provides a detailed discussion of questions relating to appropriate data models, data structures and computational procedures for the efficient storage, retrieval and analysis of spatially-indexed data.

Remote-sensing technology applied to forest assessment in California

Remote-sensing technology has been thoroughly evaluated for the analysis of California forest policy. A statewide, 1.6-acre-resolution, digital land-cover data base of Landsat Multispectral Scanner (MSS) classification has been produced. Three major resource regions have been analyzed in detail and one of them geographically integrated with 12 other physical and socioeconomic data layers to model fire and reforestation problems, using a geographic information system (GIS). A study of GIS design criteria has been conducted and the California Department of Forestry, the cooperator in all of these studies, is presently evaluating the alternatives and implementing certain aspects of them.