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2011
Abstract The work reported here explores the idea of identifying a small set of core concepts of spatial information. These concepts are chosen such that they are communicable to, and applicable by, scientists who are not specialists of spatial information. They help pose and answer questions about spatio-temporal patterns in domains that are not primarily spatial, such as biology, economics, or linguistics.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015
Since its inception in Elba (Italy) in 1993 (COSIT was born out of COSIT 0 in Pisa, Italy in 1992), the COSIT biennial conference series (www.cosit.org) has brought together leading researchers from all cognate disciplines reflecting the interdisciplinary breadth of spatial information theory, including (but not limited to) geography, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, information science, and linguistics. Following the conference on the North Sea coast in Scarborough (UK) in 2013, the 12th COSIT conference returned to the USA for the fifth time. The COSIT 2015 conference was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during October 12-16, 2015 in the oldest capital city of the USA, located near the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. We received 52 full papers, which were each thoroughly reviewed by at least three Program Committee members; 22 were selected for presentation at the conference and are included in this volume. The breadth of the topics in this volume also reflects the breadth of the disciplines involved in fundamental research related to geographic information theory. Excitingly, traditional research topics, such as space-time representations, spatial relations, navigation, (strong) spatial cognition, etc., are still alive and well. Empirical research on how to extract and analyze spatial information from rapidly growing user-generated online multimedia databases, for example, produced in a citizen science context, has clearly emerged as a new and popular research frontier in the field. Meanwhile, "big picture" theories and human behavioral studies have recently yielded fewer contributions (although still represented herein), despite being of great value to this interdisciplinary field. In addition to the single-track paper session, COSIT 2015 also offered four peerreviewed workshops and one tutorial before the conference, and a doctoral colloquium after the main conference as in previous years. These events were intended as complementary opportunities to additionally facilitate dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and research expertise. Two keynote speakers, a poster session, as well as social events rounded off the stimulating COSIT 2015 conference activities in the beautiful city of Santa Fe in the U.S. South West, renowned for the natural beauty of its landscape. Organizing a successful conference is not possible without the commitment, additional effort, and diligent help of many people. We would like to thank the international Program Committee for their timely and thorough reviews and the sponsors and supporters for providing travel support for students and keynote speakers, for supplying materials at the conference, and for supporting social events. Furthermore, the organizers of the workshops, tutorials, and doctoral colloquium contributed an important part of the overall program. We would also like to thank the conference organizing crew for all the hard work in front of and behind the scenes. Our special thanks go to Tumasch Reichenbacher in the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich who efficiently handled proceedings production matters, and Danqing Xiao in the Department of Geography at the University of New Mexico for setting up and managing conference registration. Finally, we would like to thank the most important people at any conferencethose who attended COSIT 2015 to present and discuss their work, and who by so doing demonstrated the continuing strength of spatial information theory as a research field in its own right.
Annals of the Association of American …, 2011
2009
GIS and Theoretical Geography Cognitive Categories and Experiential Realism Categories Perception, Cognition, and Schemata Some Geographical Examples Models of Space Models of Geographic Space What is the ’Objective’ Geometry of Geographic Space?
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at <http://dnb.ddb.de>.
Topoi-an International Review of Philosophy, 2001
I have in front of me on my desk a road atlas of Europe, opened at the page showing the area of southern Europe spanned by the cities of Lyon, Marseille, and Torino. What a wealth of information the map provides! At the bottom of the page is a uniform pale blue expanse representing the Mediterranean sea, but above this, where the land begins, all is a riot of words, symbols, and patches of colour. The mountainous areas of Savoie and Haute-Provence are picked out by irregular patches of light grey shading giving a suitable impression of uneven topography. Certain individual mountains are indicated by means of little triangles annotated with their heights in metres. There are many wooded areas indicated by patches of pale green, and rivers represented by winding blue lines. As it is a road atlas, these natural features merely serve as a background to the enormous number of man-made features that are depicted. There are cities, towns and villages in abundance: most of them are shown as circles of various sizes, but the larger cities are represented as expanses of yellow indicating, at least approximately, the true shape and extent of the built-up area. And there is, of course, an intricate web of roads, from the motorways shown as bold yellow lines bordered in red, to a succession of lesser roads in red, yellow, or white, their thicknesses varying to indicate their relative importance. In addition to all this, of course, there are conventional markings such as administrative boundaries, grid-lines, and a great many names.
Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 1996
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 especi...
After a decade of temporal reasoning in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the 1980s and 1990s, spatial reasoning and spatial cognition have moved into the focus of interest in concentrated research enterprises since the mid 1990s. This paper describes the interdisciplinary research area of spatial cognition from an artificial intelligence perspective and motivates the interest in the field and the challenges from a cognitive perspective. It argues that all themes of cognitive science surface in spatial cognition and that spatial cognition is particularly suitable to investigate these themes. The particular significance of spatial structures for knowledge acquisition and knowledge processing by cognitive agents is described; it is shown why spatial structures are instrumental in making sense of physical environments and abstract worlds. Basic approaches to computationally process spatial knowledge are sketched out; the role of qualitative reasoning in AI is compared to the role of qualitative approaches in other disciplines. The relative merits of intrinsically spatial and of more abstract, non-spatial ways of dealing with spatial knowledge are discussed. The role of schematic representation of spatial knowledge is addressed.
1990
ABSTRACT. Numerous proposals have been made to extend the relational database query language SQL to serve as a spatial query language and currently efforts are under way to establish a standardized spatial SQL. Here it is argued that the SQL framework is inappropriate for an interactivespatial query language and an extended spatial SQL is at best a short-term solution.
2019
Given identical informational content, the order in which you receive spatial information may heavily influence the correctness of your mental representation. This can reveal important insights into the specifics of human spatial cognition and the way we integrate information. Despite its importance in everyday life, its causes and the mental processes involved still remain an open question. Most cognitive models so far have focused on modeling only answer distributions or just the most frequent answer given by all participants. In this paper we take a rather radical approach: We turn to the individual spatial reasoner and focus our analyses on the stream of spatial information and related reaction times, i.e., how the spatial information is represented and cognitively processed. By spanning a space of 243 cognitive spatial models, some of which outperform the current state-of-the art models, it is possible to test the goodness of general principles underlying such models.
2001
In the spirit of David Hilbert’s 1900 lecture, it would seem appropriate at the commencement of the 21 century to highlight some research areas, challenges, problems and possible directions that will be taken up by spatial scientists in the coming decades. The paper covers areas such as spatio-temporal data, data management, data models and representation, intelligent spatial systems, cognition, culture, education, mobile delivery and the world wide web. The paper does not attempt to describe how these changes will come about, nor does it go into detail with any one idea or challenge. The purpose here is to highlight the variety and diversity of fields that are part of the domain of spatial information science, and offer some thoughts on some current challenges.
Asian Geographer, 2018
The present paper aims to explore how the principle of "spatiality" provides internal consistency and intrinsic unity to the science of geography. The main idea is that geography as a science has an intrinsic unity based on the principle of "spatiality," which embraces many manifestations in some of the main dimensions of this science, and almost all various perceptions from this science and from various aspects of it refer to the principle of "spatiality." Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the nature of geographic knowledge and attempts to read this science based on the principle of linguistic unity and conceptual cohesion in some of its most important aspects (Geo, language, perspective, concepts. ideas, concerns, teaching and learning, application and purposes). This is to improve the integrity of understanding and introducing Geography among other sciences.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. Define and describe spatial analysis. 2. Describe the trends and significant developments in spatial analysis. 3. Define, describe, and illustrate key spatial concepts. 4. Learn about the unique properties of spatial data and inherent challenges. In conventional terms, geographers regard spatial analysis as a broad and comprehensive undertaking that entails the use of well-established ana-lytical/visualization tools and procedures to analyze and synthesize loca-tionally referenced data. The approaches are rigorous and are drawn from statistical, mathematical, and geographical principles to conduct a systematic examination of spatial patterns and processes, including the exploration of interactions between space and time. Studying the locational and distribu-tional arrangement of objects, people, events, and processes in space, and the underlying factors that account for these arrangements are some of the analytical goals of a geospatial data scientist. The work requires a place-based mindset with emphasis on uncovering spatial patterns and spatial linkages, and examining spatial behaviors and complex interactions within and across locations that result in these distributional patterns. Engaging in spatial analysis typically requires the use of quantitative data in a digital format, but increasingly data scientists are devising interesting and creative ways to integrate qualitative and contextual data into the analysis. Once a research project is defined with the articulation of a clear set of goals, objectives, and research questions, the data scientist begins by systematically choosing the appropriate units of observation from which to collect the data, the spatial scales at which they will be measured, and the variables and means by which the data values will be assigned to those variables. The field of spatial analysis is inspired by a strong logical positivist tradition that involves inductive and deductive reasoning, hypothesis testing, and
International Journal of …, 1999
1989
Development of a comprehensive model of spatial relations is important to improved geographic information and analysis systems, and also to cognitive science and behavioral geography. This paper first reviews concepts of space. A critical distinction is between small-scale spaces, whose geometry can be directly perceived through vision and other senses, and large-scale space, which can be perceived only in relatively small parts. Fundamental terms for spatial relations often are based on concepts from small-scale space, and are metaphorically extended to large-scale (geographic) space. Reference frames, which form an important basis both for spatial language and for spatial reasoning, are discussed. Lastly, we set as a short term but important goal a search for geometries of spatial language.
After a review of previous work on resolution in geographic information science (GIScience), this article presents a theory of spatial and temporal resolution of sensor observations. Resolution of single observations is computed based on the characteristics of the receptors involved in the observation process, and resolution of observation collections is assessed based on the portion of the study area (or study period) that has been observed by the observations in the collection. The theory is formalized using Haskell. The concepts suggested for the description of the resolution of observation and observation collections are turned into ontology design patterns, which can be used for the annotation of current observations with their spatial and temporal resolution.
Geographies
An enumeration of spatial autocorrelation’s (SA’s) polyvalent forms occurred nearly three decades ago. Attempts to conceive and disseminate a clearer explanation of it employ metaphors seeking to better relate SA to a student’s or spatial scientist’s personal knowledge databank. However, not one of these uses the jigsaw puzzle metaphor appearing in this paper, which exploits an analogy between concrete visual content organization and abstract map patterns of attributes. It not only makes SA easier to understand, which furnishes a useful pedagogic tool for teaching novices and others about it, but also discloses that many georeferenced data should contain a positive–negative SA mixture. Empirical examples corroborate this mixture’s existence, as well as the tendency for marked positive SA to characterize remotely sensed and moderate (net) positive SA to characterize socio-economic/demographic, georeferenced data.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006
Geographic Information Systems and Science, 2019