Daniel A. Griffith – författare

Uncertainty and context pose fundamental challenges in GIScience and geographic research. Geospatial data are imbued with errors (e.g., measurement and sampling) and various types of uncertainty that often obfuscate any understanding of the effects of contextual or environmental influences on human behaviors and experiences. These errors or uncertainties include those attributable to geospatial data measurement, model specifications, delineations of geographic context in space and time, and the use of different spatiotemporal scales and zonal schemes when analyzing the effects of environmental influences on human behaviors or experiences. In addition, emerging sources of geospatial big data – including smartphone data, data collected by GPS, and various types of wearable sensors (e.g., accelerometers and air pollutant monitors), volunteered geographic information, and/ or location- based social media data (i.e., crowd- sourced geographic information) – inevitably contain errors, and their quality cannot be fully controlled during their collection or production.

Uncertainty and Context in GIScience and Geography: Challenges in the Era of Geospatial Big Data illustrates how cutting- edge research explores recent advances in this area, and will serve as a useful point of departure for GIScientists to conceive new approaches and solutions for addressing these challenges in future research. The seven core chapters in this book highlight many challenges and opportunities in confronting various issues of uncertainty and context in GIScience and geography, tackling different topics and approaches.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.

Uncertainty and context pose fundamental challenges in GIScience and geographic research. Geospatial data are imbued with errors (e.g., measurement and sampling) and various types of uncertainty that often obfuscate any understanding of the effects of contextual or environmental influences on human behaviors and experiences. These errors or uncertainties include those attributable to geospatial data measurement, model specifications, delineations of geographic context in space and time, and the use of different spatiotemporal scales and zonal schemes when analyzing the effects of environmental influences on human behaviors or experiences. In addition, emerging sources of geospatial big data – including smartphone data, data collected by GPS, and various types of wearable sensors (e.g., accelerometers and air pollutant monitors), volunteered geographic information, and/ or location- based social media data (i.e., crowd- sourced geographic information) – inevitably contain errors, and their quality cannot be fully controlled during their collection or production.

Uncertainty and Context in GIScience and Geography: Challenges in the Era of Geospatial Big Data illustrates how cutting- edge research explores recent advances in this area, and will serve as a useful point of departure for GIScientists to conceive new approaches and solutions for addressing these challenges in future research. The seven core chapters in this book highlight many challenges and opportunities in confronting various issues of uncertainty and context in GIScience and geography, tackling different topics and approaches.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.

This Advanced Introduction provides a critical review and discussion of research concerning spatial statistics, differentiating between it and spatial econometrics, to answer a set of core questions covering the geographic-tagging-of-data origins of the concept and its theoretical underpinnings, conceptual advances, and challenges for future scholarly work. It offers a vital tool for understanding spatial statistics and surveys how concerns about violating the independent observations assumption of statistical analysis developed into this discipline.

Key Features:

The helpful insights from empirical applications of spatial statistics in agronomy, criminology, demography, economics, epidemiology, geography, remotely sensed data, urban studies, and zoology/botany, will make this book a useful tool for upper-level students in these disciplines.

Exploiting the old maxim that "a picture is worth a thousand words," scientific visualization may be defined as the transformation of numerical scientific data into informative graphical displays. It introduces a nonverbal model into subdisciplines that hitherto employed mostly or only mathematical or verbal-conceptual models. The focus of this monograph is on how scientific visualization can help revolutionize the manner in which the tendencies for (dis)similar numerical values to cluster together in location on a map are explored and analyzed, affording spatial data analyses that are better understood, presented, and used. In doing so, the concept known as spatial autocorrelation - which characterizes these tendencies and is one of the key features of georeferenced data, or data tagged to the earth''s surface - is further de-mystified. This self-correlation arises from relative locations in geographic space.