Spatial Search


Book Description

This book offers a wide ranging review of the problems associated with the search for the best location for public facilities. Typical examples of public facilities include roads and railways, pipelines and transmission wires, airports, power stations, community clinics, universities and schools. In an attempt to provide a general structure for tackling location problems in the public sector this book offers an approach based upon the notion of spatial search. This book reviews the state of the art of formal procedures in language and style which is comprehensible to the non-specialist, and places the formal procedures into the broader context of planning. The author discusses problems of measurement, and has also reviewed literature on collective decision-making, public participation, efficiency and Etopia. Case studies are included to clarify the general principles.




Spatial Search


Book Description

Two areas have fascinated me for a long time. One is the micro economic theory of consumer behavior, the other one the role of space in economic processes. Usually, the two don't go together very well. In more advanced versions of microeconomic consumer theory its economic actor may face uncertainty, have to allocate resources over time, or have to take into ac count the characteristics of products, but rarely deals with space. He/she inhabits a spaceless point economy. Regional Science, on the other hand, describes and analyzes the spatial structure and development of the econ omy, but either ignores individual decision making altogether or treats it in a rather simplistic way. In this book I try to bring together these two areas of interest of mine. I do this by use of the microeconomic concept of search and placing it in an explicit spatial context. The result, in my opinion, is a theoretical concept with fascinating implications, a broad set of potential implications, and numerous interesting research questions. After reading this book, where I layout the basic idea of spatial search, describe its elements, and discuss some of its implications, I hope the reader will share this opinion. There are still plenty of unanswered research questions in this part of economic theory. Hopefully, this book will stimulate more work along these lines.




Complexity and Spatial Networks


Book Description

Complex systems analysis has become a fascinating topic in modern research on non-linear dynamics, not only in the physical sciences but also in the life sciences and the social sciences. After the era of bifurcation theory, chaos theory, syn- getics, resilience analysis, network dynamics and evolutionary thinking, currently we observe an increasing interest in critical transitions of dynamic real-world systems in many disciplines, such as demography, biology, psychology, economics, earth sciences, geology, seismology, medical sciences, and so on. The relevance of this approach is clearly re?ected in such phenomena as traf?c congestion, ?nancial crisis, ethnic con?icts, eco-system breakdown, health failures, etc. This has prompted a world-wide interest in complex systems. Geographical space is one of the playgrounds for complex dynamics, as is witnessed by population movements, transport ?ows, retail developments, urban expansion, lowland ?ooding and so forth. All such dynamic phenomena have one feature in common: the low predictability of uncertain interrelated events occurring at different interconnected spatio-temporal scale levels and often originating from different disciplinary backgrounds. The study of the associated non-linear (fast and slow) dynamic transition paths calls for a joint research effort of scientists from different disciplines in order to understand the nature, the roots and the con- quences of unexpected or unpredictable changes in complex spatial systems.




Seeking Spatial Justice


Book Description

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also, for renowned urban theorist Edward W. Soja, a concrete example of spatial justice in action. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, he demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. Soja focuses on such innovative labor–community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice. Effectively locating spatial justice as a theoretical concept, a mode of empirical analysis, and a strategy for social and political action, this book makes a significant contribution to the contemporary debates about justice, space, and the city.




Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R


Book Description

Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R, second edition, is divided into two basic parts, the first presenting R packages, functions, classes and methods for handling spatial data. This part is of interest to users who need to access and visualise spatial data. Data import and export for many file formats for spatial data are covered in detail, as is the interface between R and the open source GRASS GIS and the handling of spatio-temporal data. The second part showcases more specialised kinds of spatial data analysis, including spatial point pattern analysis, interpolation and geostatistics, areal data analysis and disease mapping. The coverage of methods of spatial data analysis ranges from standard techniques to new developments, and the examples used are largely taken from the spatial statistics literature. All the examples can be run using R contributed packages available from the CRAN website, with code and additional data sets from the book's own website. Compared to the first edition, the second edition covers the more systematic approach towards handling spatial data in R, as well as a number of important and widely used CRAN packages that have appeared since the first edition. This book will be of interest to researchers who intend to use R to handle, visualise, and analyse spatial data. It will also be of interest to spatial data analysts who do not use R, but who are interested in practical aspects of implementing software for spatial data analysis. It is a suitable companion book for introductory spatial statistics courses and for applied methods courses in a wide range of subjects using spatial data, including human and physical geography, geographical information science and geoinformatics, the environmental sciences, ecology, public health and disease control, economics, public administration and political science. The book has a website where complete code examples, data sets, and other support material may be found: http://www.asdar-book.org. The authors have taken part in writing and maintaining software for spatial data handling and analysis with R in concert since 2003.




Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, SSTD 2017, held in Arlington, VA, USA, in August 2017.The 19 full papers presented together with 8 demo papers and 5 vision papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The papers are organized around the current research on concepts, tools, and techniques related to spatial and temporal databases.




Spatial Big Data, BIM and advanced GIS for Smart Transformation


Book Description

This book covers a range of topics including selective technologies and algorithms that can potentially contribute to developing an intelligent environment and smarter cities. While the connectivity and efficiency of smart cities is important, the analysis of the impact of construction development and large projects in the city is crucial to decision and policy makers, before the project is approved. This book also presents an agenda for future investigations to address the need for advanced tools such as mobile scanners, Geospatial Artificial Intelligence, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Geospatial Augmented Reality apps, Light Detection, and Ranging in smart cities. Some of selected specific tools presented in this book are as a simulator for improving the smart parking practices by modelling drivers with activity plans, a bike optimization algorithm to increase the efficiency of bike stations, an agent-based model simulation of human mobility with the use of mobile phone datasets. In addition, this book describes the use of numerical methods to match the network demand and supply of bicycles, investigate the distribution of railways using different indicators, presents a novel algorithm of direction-aware continuous moving K-nearest neighbor queries in road networks, and presents an efficient staged evacuation planning algorithm for multi-exit buildings.




Geographic Information Systems: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications


Book Description

Developments in technologies have evolved in a much wider use of technology throughout science, government, and business; resulting in the expansion of geographic information systems. GIS is the academic study and practice of presenting geographical data through a system designed to capture, store, analyze, and manage geographic information. Geographic Information Systems: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a collection of knowledge on the latest advancements and research of geographic information systems. This book aims to be useful for academics and practitioners involved in geographical data.




Neurophysiological and Neuropsychological Aspects of Spatial Neglect


Book Description

Spatial Neglect is one of the few areas in Neuropsychology where clinicians, psychologists and animal experimenters have succeeded in adopting a common language. The result of interaction between these three approaches has been some important new advances, which are presented in this volume.Apart from its clinical significance in neuropsychology, Spatial Neglect raises important questions in the field of behavioral neurosciences. In this volume, three aspects are examined: a) normal subjects, where new findings on spatial behavior are described. b) brain-lesioned subjects, where the classical studies on neglect are reconsidered in the light of new findings. c) animals, where new experimental situations allow a deeper understanding of the neural substrate.




Scalable Processing of Spatial-Keyword Queries


Book Description

Text data that is associated with location data has become ubiquitous. A tweet is an example of this type of data, where the text in a tweet is associated with the location where the tweet has been issued. We use the term spatial-keyword data to refer to this type of data. Spatial-keyword data is being generated at massive scale. Almost all online transactions have an associated spatial trace. The spatial trace is derived from GPS coordinates, IP addresses, or cell-phone-tower locations. Hundreds of millions or even billions of spatial-keyword objects are being generated daily. Spatial-keyword data has numerous applications that require efficient processing and management of massive amounts of spatial-keyword data. This book starts by overviewing some important applications of spatial-keyword data, and demonstrates the scale at which spatial-keyword data is being generated. Then, it formalizes and classifies the various types of queries that execute over spatial-keyword data. Next, it discusses important and desirable properties of spatial-keyword query languages that are needed to express queries over spatial-keyword data. As will be illustrated, existing spatial-keyword query languages vary in the types of spatial-keyword queries that they can support. There are many systems that process spatial-keyword queries. Systems differ from each other in various aspects, e.g., whether the system is batch-oriented or stream-based, and whether the system is centralized or distributed. Moreover, spatial-keyword systems vary in the types of queries that they support. Finally, systems vary in the types of indexing techniques that they adopt. This book provides an overview of the main spatial-keyword data-management systems (SKDMSs), and classifies them according to their features. Moreover, the book describes the main approaches adopted when indexing spatial-keyword data in the centralized and distributed settings. Several case studies of {SKDMSs} are presented along with the applications and query types that these {SKDMSs} are targeted for and the indexing techniques they utilize for processing their queries. Optimizing the performance and the query processing of {SKDMSs} still has many research challenges and open problems. The book concludes with a discussion about several important and open research-problems in the domain of scalable spatial-keyword processing.