Spatial Information Systems – serie

This work focuses on integrating land-use location science with the technology of geographic information systems (GIS). The text describes the basic principles of location decision and the means for applying them in order to improve the real estate decision.

Many of the current publications on GIS focus on the mechanics, technology, and project-specification applications of GIS. This book teaches the reader to successfully implement GIS from a management and organizational perspective. GIS is becoming widely used, and is evolving from a mapping tool used for support functions to a technology capable of redesigning land administration. In other sectors, information technology has had a dramatic effect on operations. This book examines those experiences, and applies them to GIS implementation.The introductory section explores the GIS paradigm - the GIS technology itself does not cause improvements, but that the technology enables changes that can improve operational efficiency and effectiveness. Experience in GIS implementation has shown that the management and organizational issues are more significant than the technical issues in successful GIS implementation. An interdisciplinary approach is taken; information resource management and management science concepts are applied to GIS. The remainder of the book teaches the reader the necessary frameworks and techniques to plan, design and implement GIS as a technological infrastructure within an organization.

Major advances in the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been made in both anthropology and archaeology. Yet there have been relatively few published discussions of how GIS can be used to approach and solve complex problems in substantive research. This book will bring together users of GIS in these fields to describe research that was either too difficult - or impossible - to achieve using any other tools. The text will be divided into a general section on theory followed by sections on application in cultural anthropology, archaeology, paleoanthropology, and physical anthropology.

In an effort to further investigation into critical development facets of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), this book explores the reasoning processes that apply to geographic space and time. As a result of an iniative sponsored by the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), it treats the computational, cognitive and social science applications aspects of spatial and temporal reasoning in GIS. Essays were contributed by scholars from a broad spectrum of disciplines including: geography, cartography, surveying and engineering, computer science, mathematics and environmental and cognitive psychology.

This volume compiles geostatistical and spatial autoregressive data analyses involving georeferenced socioeconomic, natural resources, agricultural, pollution, and epidemiological variables. Benchmark analyses are followed by analyses of readily available data sets, emphasizing parallels between geostatistical and spatial autoregressive findings. Both SAS and SPSS code are presented for implementation purposes. This informative casebook will serve geographers, regional scientists, applied spatial statisticians, and spatial scientists from across disciplines.

GIS-T, an increasingly popular field, is the branch of GIS related to transportation. This professional reference/graduate level text presents a comprehensive and rigorous analysis of GIS-T applications in the analysis and planning of transportation systems.

Can transportation problems be fixed by the right neighborhood design? The tremendous popularity of the 'new urbanism' and 'livable communities' initiatives suggests that many persons think so. As a systematic assessment of attempts to solve transportation problems through urban design, this book asks and answers three questions: Can such efforts work? Will they be put into practice? Are they a good idea?

Evolutionary models (e.g genetic algorithms, artificial life) are emerging as an important new tool for geographic information systems for a number of reasons. First, they are highly appropriate for modelling geographic phenomena; second, geographical problems are often spatially separate (broken down into logical or regional problems), and evolutionary algorithms can exploit this structure; and finally, the ability to store, mainipulate, and visualize spatial data has increased to the point that space-time attribute databases can be easily handled. This book is proposed to serve as a guide to the evolutionary modelling of spatial phenomena.

Spatial analysis assists theoretical understanding and empirical testing in the social sciences, and rapidly expanding applications of geographic information technologies have advanced the spatial data-gathering needed for spatial analysis and model making. This much-needed volume covers outstanding examples of spatial thinking in the social sciences, with each chapter showing some aspect of how certain social processes can be understood by analyzing their spatial context. The audience for this work is as trans-disciplinary as its authorship because it contains approaches and methodologies useful to geography, anthropology, history, political science, economics, criminology, sociology, and statistics.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology, under development since the late 1960s, is being applied in a growing variety of public and private sector endeavours: real estate planning, land administration, resource management, environmental monitoring, etc. Each of these endeavours entails the creation and management of a variety of datasets. In addition to the cost of the technology, the most significant cost element in GIS exploitation is the establishment and maintenance of the relevant standardized databases, keeping these databases current and ensuring their inter-operability. Achieving cost-effective data sharing from different sources, however, requires policies and standards that provide a legislative, regulatory, financial operating environment of predictable integrity: a Geospatial Data Infrastructure (GDI). Its creation demands negotiating agreements defining the institutional environment and arrangements between database-producing and using organizations. This book aims to provide a clear conceptual framework, consistent terminology, reference cases, and recommended practices for design, implementation, and management of GDI. It is meant both for academics and for practitioners faced with the design, implementation, and maintenance of GDI at all levels of government and private sector enterprises, as well as in the international financial institutions involved with underwriting GDI projects.

The role of property in fostering good governance, robust economies, and strong civil societies has received fresh attention in the wake of the collapse of communism, the adoption of a market driven approach to the economy, and the increasing impact of information technology. Some of these reforms have focused on a diverse package of measures dealing with land tenure security, land and property transactions, and access to credit. They have also been concerned with supporting physical planning, the sustainable management and control of land use and of natural resources, and facilitating real property taxation. As well, there has been a growing awareness of the requirement to address such issues as the protection of the environment and the provision of land for all people whatever their gender, but especially for the poor and ethnic minorities. Land Administration provides a high level overview of recent advances in building formal property systems throughout the world and reviews the role of property in advancing a society's economic and social agenda. It undertakes an in-depth examination of the land administration infrastructure required to support these modern property systems, giving particular attention to the survey, registration, valuation, and land use control functions. The text also provides an extended discussion of the information management challenges associate with the land administration field.

This book is a contribution to the emerging discipline of Qualitative Spatial Information Theory. The discipline has arisen from a realization that traditional quantitative techniques for the analysis of spatial phenomena must be supplemented by a wide range of qualitative methods if we are to use information technology effectively to further our capacity for handling spatio-temporal information. Such qualitative methods must be supported by a body of theory concerning the nature and organization of our spatio-temporal concepts. This theory will cover time, space, objects in space, their spatial attributes, changes in those attributes, and the temporal structure of those changes. In this book each topic is given a chapter to itself, and theory of qualitative spaces as partitions of quantitative spaces is developed in detail, and applied to numerous particular cases. The theory thus provides a uniform basis for the further development of formal and computational theories of spatial change.