Geographic Information Science

Transcription

1 Geographic Information Science David M. Mark Professor of Geography & Director, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis University at Buffalo

2 Part 1: Geographic Information Science and GIS Research at Buffalo

3 Geographic Information Many social, economic, and environmental processes operate at geographic scales, over geographic space Thus Geographic Information is relevant to many human activities and decisions

4 Geographic Information Systems In the 1960s and 1970s, software systems were developed to manage geographic information In the 1980s, this developed into a commercial GIS software industry The University at Buffalo (SUNY) has long been a leading producer of trained professionals in the GIS field

5 Geographic Information Systems at the University at Buffalo In 1975, Buffalo established the first GIS Laboratory of that name in a U.S. university In 1988, Buffalo and its partners were awarded the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis by the National Science Foundation NCGIA continues both as a national research consortium, and as an Organized Research Unit at Buffalo

6 Major GIS Application Areas (URISA Journal v 12 No 2 Spring 2000) Crime Analysis Emergency Preparedness Public Health and Human Services Urban and Regional Planning Water Resources Transportation Planning and Monitoring Etc.

7 Geographic Information Science Geographic information science is the information science behind GIS software! GIScience develops and augments the theory upon which GIS of the future can be built GIScience extends the capability of GIS GIScience studies the relationships between GIS and society

8 Geographic Information Science GIScience emerged around 1990 as a response to gaps in GIS software and technology GIScience is sometimes referred to as GeoInformatics

9 Research Projects at SUNY Buffalo Supported by Research Grants In the 2000/2001 year, NCGIA managed 20 external grants These grants involved 20 different faculty as PI or co-pi Those faculty come from 8 different academic departments in 3 Schools (CAS, SEAS, Medical) Civil, Structural, & Environmental Engineering, Computer Science & Engineering, Geography, Geology, Industrial Engineering, Philosophy, Political Science, Social and Preventive Medicine

10 2000/2001 Funding: Other Facts Project direct cost budgets currently exceed $1 million per year In academic year , NCGIA grants employed approximately 40 graduate students

11 2000/2001 Funding: Sources National Science Foundation (8) National Institutes of Health (2) National Imagery and Mapping Agency (2) CUBRC (3) Of these, 2 are US DoT, 1 NYS DoT) US Environmental Protection Agency (1) Others: NASA (1), NIJ (1), CDC, USARMC (1), FGDC/UCGIS (1)

12 NCGIA Members Anthropology Ezra B Zubrow Biological Sciences Guiyun Yan Civil, Structural, & Environmental Engineering Joseph F Atkinson Alan Rabideau Computer Science & Engineering Stuart C Shapiro Aidong Zhang Economics Alex Anas Geology Marcus Bursik Michael Sheridan

13 NCGIA Members Geography S. Bagchi-Sen Ling Bian Hugh W Calkins Meghan S Cope Douglas Flewelling Chris S Larsen Barry Lentnek David M Mark Peter Rogerson Jean-Claude Thill Michael J Woldenberg Industrial Engineering Rajan Batta Christopher M Rump Law Robert I Reis Information Studies Corinne Jorgensen

14 NCGIA Members Linguistics David A Zubin Philosophy Robert Casati Barry Smith Planning Hugh S Cole G. William Page Political Science Munroe Eagles Regional Community Policing Center Pamela K Beal Social and Preventive Medicine Jo Freudenheim John Vena Sociology Stephen Hart

15 Some Recent Externally- Funded Projects

16 Geospatial Lifelines National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health Spatio-Temporal GIS Analysis for Environmental Health D. Mark, L. Bian, P. Rogerson, J. Vena with Max Egenhofer, U. Maine* Geography and Social & Preventive Medicine $1,563,536 over 4 years* * includes subaward to the University of Maine

17 Geospatial Lifelines Hot spots and clusters Influences of human residential mobility D 2000 A B C John Mary Fred D 1910 A B C

18 Breast Cancer Risk National Institutes for Health Breast Cancer Risk: Residential environment & genetics J. Freudenheim Social & Preventive Medicine $231,000 over 2 years

19 Breast Cancer Research USARMC, US Army Environmental Exposures at Birth and Menarche and Risk of Breast Cancer J. Freudenheim and D. Mark Social & Preventive Medicine and Geography $153,476 over 3 years

20 Angler Cohort Study CDC/ATDSR (Center for Disease Control) The New York State Angler Cohort Study: Reproductive and Developmental Health J. Vena Social and Preventive Medicine $4,339,908 over 3 years

21 Geographical Changes in Crime National Institute of Justice Detection and Prediction of Geographical Changes in Crime Rates P. Rogerson, R. Batta, and C. Rump Geography and Industrial Engineering $221,520 over 2 years

22 Crime Analysis

23

24 A Socio-Economic Model of the Geographical Displacement of Crime Model to predict the number of crime incidents within a police jurisdiction E[R] m Opportunity Cost of crime Expected reward is a function of wealth, crime level & police enforcement Goal is to determine the best allocation of police enforcement resources n n * (1) n (2) Crime Level

25 Monitoring Spatial Patterns National Science Foundation, Geography and Regional Science Methods for the Monitoring of Spatial Patterns P. Rogerson Geography $93,763 over 2 years

26 Quick Detection of Geographic Clusters of Crime 1996 Arsons Methods of spatial analysis that are used in finding clusters of crime are often retrospective Alternative: Repeated testing of patterns of crime as new data become available Objective is to uncover new geographic patterns quickly Blue Dots Represent Successive Arsons Leading to New Geographic Cluster Signal

27 Immersive Information Spaces National Imagery and Mapping Agency Immersive Information Spaces for Data Access and Dissemination S. Fabrikant, UCSB, D. Mark, UB, and. D. Montello, UCSB $366,071 over 3 years*

28 Image Databases This project focuses on the automatic identification and retrieval of industrial building sites from digital aerial photographs Sample Image Retrieved Images of industrial sites in Buffalo

29 Digital Government National Science Foundation, Digital Government Program Very Large Scale Multidimensional Data Management and Retrieval for USGS and NIMA Imagery A. Zhang and D. Mark Computer Science & Engineering and Geography $500,000 over 3 years

30 Digital Libraries, Japan Collaboration National Science Foundation, Digital Libraries Program Metadata Model, Resource Discovery & Querying on Large-Scale Multidimensional Datasets A. Zhang and D. Mark at Buffalo Frederic Andres at National Institute of Informatics $400,000 over 3 years

31 Satellite Imagery Analysis National Aeronautics & Space Administration Tephrostratigraphic and satellite-imagery analysis of Kamchatka shoreline: Great earthquakes and megaeruptions of Kamchatka, Russia M. Bursik and L. Bian Geology and Geography $110,000 over 2 years

32 Multi-Resolution Data Retrieval National Imagery and Mapping Agency A Multi-Resolution Geographical Data Retrieval System L. Bian and A. Zhang Geography and Computer Science & Engineering $75,125 over 3.3 years

33 GIS Calibration Tools for Groundwater Modeling U.S. Environmental Protection Agency GIS-Based Calibration Tools for a High Performance Analytic Element Model A. Rabideau, M. Becker, and D. Flewelling, CSEE, Geology and Geography $997,100 over 3 years

34 GIS Calibration Tools for Groundwater Modeling 26 High Level Hazardous Waste Sites in Niagara and Erie Counties 125+ tons of hazardous chemicals per year No comprehensive model of groundwater flow in Niagara County... so it could be more GIS User Interface Engineering Models Spatial DB Creating a framework for building regional models of groundwater flow from geographic data Project funded by US EPA

35 Transportation Improvements NYS Department of Transportation (via CUBRC) Economic Development & Transportation Improvements J-C Thill Geography $85,636 over 1.25 years

36 Emergency Response: Transportation Highway fatalities and air medical transport services Uses Fatal Accident Response System (FARS) data Collaborative work with Veridian

37 Urban and Regional Planning, Regional Economic Development REDD- Regional Economic Development Database UB Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth

38 Ontology National Science Foundation, Geography and Regional Science Geographic Categories: An Ontological Investigation D. Mark and B. Smith Geography and Philosophy $199,689 over 3 years

39 Mountains are the Best Example of Geographic Things QuickTime and a Planar RGB decompressor are needed to see this picture.

40 Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training National Science Foundation, Division of Graduate Education Integrative Graduate Education & Research Training in Geographic Information Science D. Mark, R. Batta, B. Smith, E. Zubrow 8 academic departments $2,349,350 over 5 years

41 IGERT in GIScience Total funding $2.3M over 5 years Buffalo s GIScience IGERT currently supports 21 Ph.D. students in four departments

42 Part 2: An Overview of Geographic Information Science

43 Outline of Part 2 Introduction Components of Geographic Information Science History of the Field Summary and Prospects

44 Geographic Information Science "Geographic Information Science (GIScience) is the basic research field that seeks to redefine geographic concepts and their use in the context of geographic information systems. GIScience also examines the impacts of GIS on individuals and society, and the influences of society on GIS.

45 Geographic Information Science GIScience re-examines some of the most fundamental themes in traditional spatially oriented fields such as geography, cartography, and geodesy, while incorporating more recent developments in cognitive and information science

46 Geographic Information Science It also overlaps with and draws from more specialized research fields such as computer science, statistics, mathematics, and psychology, and contributes to progress in those fields." (NSF Workshop)

47 What GIScience is Not Geographic Information Science is not just a new name for GIS applications! Even the use of GIS as a tool in scientific research is not Geographic Information Science at a recent NSF workshop, this latter area was termed "Research Using GIS : Research Using GIS, or RuGIS, is important to the sciences, and to funding for GIS-related scientific work, but is not GIScience per se

48 Components of GI Science The nature of a scientific field can be characterized by listing its components This is not of course the first attempt to list components for GIscience, and earlier efforts will be reviewed later This order was chosen so that the new proposed structure could be used to frame the review of previous efforts

49 Components of GI Science These components are not meant to define a cuttingedge research agenda It is more like a curriculum for the field, the basic subfields, even if research on some of them is relatively mature Also, these headings are neither definitive nor exhaustive, and several important topics that do not readily fit into the scheme are reported under the heading Loose Ends below

50 1. Ontology of the Geographic Domain Ontology deals with what exists, and with what may possibly exist In this sense, it is a branch of philosophy that deals with some of the most fundamental aspects of scientific inquiry, but at a very high level of abstraction. Ontology seeks to provide a consistent formal theory of tokens (instances) and types (kinds) in the real world, their relationships, and the processes that modify them

51 2. Formal Representation of Geographic Phenomena More recently, the term ontology has been used in information science and knowledge representation to refer to the specifications of the conceptualizations employed by different groups of users in regard to domains of objects of different types The resulting representations are types in the digital domain, to be instantiated through data to become digital tokens (data instances) that correspond to geographic things in reality

52 3. Acquisition and Quality of Geographic Data Data (measurements) of positions and attributes of the geographic domain is still central to GIS Technologies for the acquisition of geographic data and information, chiefly remote sensing and GPS, are important here The accuracy of geographic information, also termed data quality research, is included here but could be listed as a major heading in its own right

53 4. Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Reasoning about spatial relations and positions is a well-established research area in artificial intelligence, and has become important in GIScience as well. There are basically two domains for spatial relations: Distance and direction for disjoint spatial objects (Mereo)Topological spatial relations for spatial objects that touch or overlap (9 intersection or RCC) Relations can be characterized on quantitative or qualitative scales

54 5. Computational Geometry Computational geometry provides fundamentals for metric representation of objects and relations in geographic space Efficient computation of proximity, handled under the conceptual framework variously labeled as Voronoi diagrams, or Thiessen or proximal polygons, is especially important Analytical cartography is an alternative term for many aspects of computational geometry applied to the geospatial domain Map generalization also falls here

55 6. Efficient Indexing, Retrieval, and Search in Geographic Databases Efficient indexing of multidimensional data is an important problem in database research in computer science. Since geographic information is inherently at least two dimensional, these indexing issues have long been important in GIS. Morton 'matrix' approach for ordering map areas in CGIS (Morton, 1966). Quadtrees (see Samet, 1989, for a review) Many related indexing schemes such as B-trees, R-trees, k- d trees, etc.

56 7. Spatial Statistics Spatial statistics is an important research area with strong links to Geographic Information Science. Spatial autocorrelation or dependence is often present in geospatial information Spatial statistics (Cressie, 1993) provides formal statistical methods for characterizing and dealing with spatial autocorrelation

57 8. Cognitive Models of Geographic Phenomena This research area involves the study of human perception, learning, memory, reasoning, and communication of and about geographic phenomena An explicit examination of human cognition of geographic things was originally introduced into the GIScience agenda as a way to gain insight into geographic ontology, spatial relations, and human-computer interaction for GIS (Mark and Frank, 1991) The COSIT meetings attest to the strength and breadth of this research component

58 9. Human Interaction with Geographic Information and Technology Human-computer interaction (HCI) for geographic information systems, and the design of user interfaces for GIS, are perhaps the most obvious example of the relevance of cognition to GIS If geographic concepts and HCI cannot be dealt with separately, then the GIScience research community must address problems in the overlap

59 10. Geographic Information, Institutions, and Society Societal impacts of GIS technology have been a studied within GIS since its onset Indeed, before 1980, most technical innovation in GIS occurred in a direct application context During the 1980s, commercial software matured and an academic GIS R&D agenda developed In the 1990s, there was an increase in research on economic and legal aspects of geographic information, plus a post-modern critique of GIS These trends continue

60 (11. Spatial Analysis?) Is the development of new methods of spatial analysis part of GIScience? Or does spatial analysis represent an application of the results of GIScience to problems in environmental or social science? Is spatial analysis a useful grouping of GIScience topics? Or is it already covered by the ontology, representation, and spatial statistics topics? MAUP seems clearly to be a GIScience issue, even if spatial analysis in general is not

61 (12. Missing Topics?) Where does map algebra (Tomlin 1990) fit into this conceptual scheme? What about scale? What about time? What about GeoVisualization? What about GeoComputation? What other topics in GIScience are missing?

62 Other Lists of Components Mike Goodchild made a keynote address about GISrelated research priorities to the Spatial Data Handling conference in Zurich, Switzerland in 1990, entitling the talk Spatial Information Science The address was subsequently published in 1992 in the International Journal of Geographical Information Systems under the modified title Geographical Information Science

63 Goodchild s definition In the IJGIS article, Goodchild did not provide a crisp definition of the field, but did discuss what he called "the content of geographical information science", under the following eight headings:

64 Goodchild s Content of geographical information science 1. Data collection and measurement 2. Data capture 3. Spatial statistics 4. Data modeling and theories of spatial data 5. Data structures, algorithms and processes 6. Display 7. Analytical tools 8. Institutional, managerial and ethical issues

65 The University Consortium for Geographic Information S... A series of discussions through 1992 and 1993 led to a founding meeting in Boulder, Colorado, in December, 1994 Several words in the name were debated, and votes were taken The delegates voted to make the name the "University Consortium for Geographic Information Science", rather than UCGI Systems or UCGI & Analysis. In June 1996, 10 UCGIS research priorities were identified.

66 UCGIS Research Challenges in GIScience (1996) Spatial Data Acquisition and Integration Distributed Computing Extensions to Geographic Representation Cognition of Geographic Information Interoperability of Geographic Information Scale Spatial Analysis in a GIS Environment The Future of the Spatial Information Infrastructure Uncertainty in Spatial Data and GIS-based Analyses GIS and Society

67 UCGIS Emerging Research Themes (2001) Ontological Foundations for Geographic Information Science GeoVisualization Geographic Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery Remotely-Acquired Data & Information

68 Comparison of Components

69 All Three Agree Keyword DMM scheme Goodchild 1992 UCGIS Representation Formal Representation of Geographic Phenomena Data modeling and theories of spatial data Extensions to Geographic Representation Acquisition Acquisition and Quality of Geographic Data Data collection and measurement; Data capture Spatial Data Acquisition and Integration; Uncertainty in Spatial Data and GIS-based Analyses GI & Society Geographic Information, Institutions, and Society Institutional, managerial and ethical issues GIS and Society

70 Two of Three Agree Keyword DMM scheme Goodchild 1992 UCGIS Analysis (Spatial Analysis) Analytical Tools Spatial Analysis in a GIS Environment Cognition Cognitive Models of Geographic Phenomena - Cognition of Geographic Information Geometry Computational Geometry Data Structures, Algorithms, and Processes - Indexing Efficient Indexing in Geographic Databases Data Structures, Algorithms, and Processes - Statistics Spatial Statistics Spatial Statistics -

71 No Agreement Goodchild Display UCGIS Distributed Computing Interoperability of Geographic Information Scale The Future of the Spatial Information Infrastructure This Paper Ontology of the Geographic Domain Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Human Interaction with GI and Technology

72 Summary and Prospects Geographic Information Science has considerable depth, and a richness of intellectual challenges that mark it as a legitimate multidisciplinary field and perhaps an emerging new discipline It is my opinion that progress in the field would be aided by a consensus among leading researchers on the nature, scope, and elements of the field

73 Thank you for your attention! Contacts: David M Mark, Director, NCGIA dmark@geog.buffalo.edu Web: