Spatializing Research Hypotheses a long- term research vision for

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1 Spatializing Research Hypotheses a long- term research vision for spatial@ucsb Werner Kuhn Center for Spatial Studies

2 a vision for spatial Spatial computing shall reach the same level of general utility for the sciences, humanities, and engineering that statistics has, through general education ( stats and spats courses) computing tools (commercial and open source) support for hypothesis testing.

3 a research question how can spatial reference be made explicit in scientific hypotheses? a generic method would vastly expand the reach of spatial and spatio-temporal thinking and computing

4 Snow, J. (1855). On the mode of communication of cholera (2nd ed., 162pp).

5 Researching Natural Products against Neglected Diseases see h4p:// muenster.de/chemie.pb/forschen/resnetnpnd/

6 Krugman (1991): Increasing Returns and Economic Geography

7 ! The Economist, Feb 24th 2005: A be4er democracy McCarty et al. (2009): Does Gerrymandering Cause PolarizaRon?

8 state of the art The role of location needs to be explored case-by-case, often without access to spatial computing or spatially referenced data.! Spatial analysis requires specialized and complex software, or is even done by hand (drawing maps and diagrams, as Dr. Snow did 150 years ago).! Experimental platforms and spatial analysis tools are not interoperable.! The semantics of data is ambiguous, endangering meaningful analyses.

9 how to spatialize hypotheses (1) Ontology specifies participation relations for (deterministic) processes. It is to spatial computing what probability is to statistics (and vice versa!). participates in things that are in time. things that happen in time

10 how to spatialize hypotheses (2) 1. all scientific hypotheses are about processes because theories make predictions, which refer to process outcomes people drinking water from a certain pump get cholera 2. all processes have participants participants are located in space-time (physical or abstract) cholera patients and water pumps 3. processes and participants are influenced by location participants move on paths and networks residents get water from pumps nearby participants interact residents get water from nearest pump processes shape participants the shape of blood cells indicates diseases growth forms spatial patterns deforestation starts with a fish bone pattern of roads.

11 a research program 1. identify documented cases of process models in scientific studies where space makes a difference (from the literature) 2. focus on processes of motion, growth, and interaction (conjecture: all processes involve motion at some scale) 3. identify objects, fields, and network participants in these processes (as suggested by the core concepts of spatial information) 4. test for the role of location in process outcomes 5. integrate with related work from complex systems theory.

12 example beneficiaries (life sciences) h4p:// muenster.de/chemie.pb/forschen/resnetnpnd/

13 a scientist s spatialized workflow 1. pick a process that may be at work in the studied phenomenon 2. identify its participants in a space at the scale of the process 3. analyze their spatial distribution (by clustering, nearest neighbors, density surfaces, network analyses, ) 4. formulate a hypothesis (deterministically and stochastically) y = f (x) + z 5. test the model (through observation, simulation, ) 6. publish the observations, models, and findings as Linked Data.

14 building a spatially enabled knowledge infrastructure new resource existing annotation workflow library catalog metadata conversion using predefined vocabularies RDF representation interlinking interlinked RDF representation link discovery (e.g., place name recognition & georeferencing, ) enrichment Linked Data cloud

15 concluding thoughts 1. Broadening the impact of spatial computing requires a change in attitude old: GIS is a sophisticated technology for experts, requiring solid training new: spatial computing should be as simple as possible (but not simpler) analogy: emphasis on inferential over descriptive methods hurts statistics education (Weaver 1982). 2. I have sketched a research program to systematize the use of spatial computing in scientific investigations across domains based on process participants complementing data-driven statistics with ontology-driven spatialization 3. If statistics is the logic of measurement, is spatial computing its geometry?

16 Geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space, but because where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen. Barney Warf and Santa Arias: The Spatial Turn (Introduction)

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