Frontiers of Geographic Information Technology

335 Pages·2006·5.669 MB·English

by  Sanjay Rana, Jayant Sharma (auth.), Sanjay Rana, Jayant Sharma (eds.)

Sanjay Rana
Jayant Sharma
Frontiers of Geographic Information Technology
Sanjay Rana
Jayant Sharma
Editors
Frontiers
of Geographic
Information

Technology

W ith 107 Figures, 14 in Color, and 11 Tables
Editors
Sanjay Rana Jayant Sharma
Centrefor Transport Studies Oracle Corporation
Department of Civil and 1 Oracle Drive
Environmental Engineering NashuaNH 03062
University College London USA
LondonWC1E 6BT
UK
E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected]
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005930053
ISBN-10 3-540-25685-7 Springer Berlin Heidelberg New York
ISBN-13 978-3-540-25685-4 Springer Berlin Heidelberg New York
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is
concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication
of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright
Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained
from Springer-Verlag. Violations are liable for prosecution under the German Copyright Law.
Springer-Verlag is a part of Springer Science + Business Media
springer.com
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006
Printed in the Netherlands
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not
imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Cover design: Erich Kirchner, Heidelberg
Typesetting:SPI Publisher Sevices
Production: Almas Schimmel
Printing: Krips bv, Meppel
Binding: Stürtz AG, Würzburg
Printed on acid free paper 30/3141/as - 5 4 3 2 1 0
Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Geographic Information Technologies – An Overview 1
Sanjay Rana and Jayant Sharma

Chapter 2 Soft Computing in Geographical Information Systems 47
Yingjie Yang, David Gillingwater and Chris Hinde

Chapter 3 Using Geospatial Information for Autonomous Systems Control 63
Ayanna Howard and Edward Tunstel

Chapter 4 Agent-Based Technologies and GIS: Simulating Crowding,
Panic, and Disaster Management 81
Michael Batty

Chapter 5 Distributed Geospatial Information Service 103
Chaowei (Phil) Yang and C. Vincent Tao

Chapter 6 Geospatial Grid 121
Liping Di

Chapter 7 Geospatial Semantic Web 139
Yaser Bishr

Chapter 8 The role of DBMS in the new generation GIS architecture 155
Sisi Zlatanova and Jantien Stoter

Chapter 9 Multimodal Interfaces for Representing and Accessing
Geospatial Information 181
Reginald G. Golledge, Matthew T. Rice and R. Daniel Jacobson

Chapter 10 Wayfinding with mobile devices: decision support
for the mobile citizen 209
Sabine Timpf
vi
Chapter 11 Augmented Reality Visualization of Geospatial Data 229
Daniel Holweg and Ursula Kretschmer

Chapter 12 Geo-ICT and Development – The Inverted Pyramid Syndrome 241
Satyaprakash, Ayon K.Tarafdar and Ravi Gupta

Chapter 13 Privacy Issues in Geographic Information Technologies 257
Alastair R. Beresford

Chapter 14 Frontiers of Geographic Information Technology 279
Sanjay Rana and Jayant Sharma

References 289
Subject Index 325
List of Contributors

Satyaprakash Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions,
G - 4, Sector - 39, Noida - 201 301 (UP), India

Michael Batty Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London,
1-19 Torrington Place, London WC1E 6BT, UK

Alastair R. Beresford Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, 15 JJ
Thomson Ave, Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK

Yaser Bishr Image Matters LLC, 201 Loudoun Street SW, Leesburg, VA 20175,
USA

Liping Di 6301 Ivy Lane, Suite 620, Greenbelt, MD 20770, USA

Reginald G. Golledge Department of Geography and Research Unit on Spatial
Cognition and Choice, Elison Hall 3611, University of California Santa Barbara,
Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA

David Gillingwater Centre for Transport Studies, Department of Civil and
Building Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK

Ravi Gupta Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions,
G - 4, Sector - 39, Noida - 201 301 (UP), India

Chris Hinde Department of Computer Science, Loughborough University,
Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK

Daniel Holweg Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Datenverarbeitung,
Fraunhoferstr. 5, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany
Ayanna Howard NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of
Technology, Pasadena, California, 91109, USA

R. Daniel Jacobson Department of Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences,
University of Calgary, Earth Sciences 356, 2500 University Drive N.W., Calgary,
Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada
viii List of Contributors
Ursula Kretschmer Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics
Research, Fraunhoferstr. 5, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany

Sanjay Rana Centre for Transport Studies, Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK

Matthew T. Rice Department of Geography and Research Unit on Spatial
Cognition and Choice, Elison Hall 3611, University of California Santa Barbara,
Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA

Jayant Sharma Oracle Corporation, 1 Oracle Drive, Nashua NH 03062, USA

Jantien Stoter ITC, Department of Geo-Information Processing, PO Box 6, 7500
AA Enschede, The Netherlands

C. Vincent Tao Geospatial Information and Communication Technology
(GeoICT) Lab, Department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering, York
University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, Canada M3J 1P3

Edward Tunstell NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of
Technology, Pasadena, California, 91109, USA

Ayon K. Tarafdar Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions,
G - 4, Sector - 39, Noida - 201 301 (UP), India

Sabine Timpf Geographic Information Science Center, Department of
Geography, University of Zurich-Ircehel, Winterthurerstr. 190 CH-8057,
Zurich, Switzerland

Chaowei (Phil) Yang Earth Systems and GeoInformation Sciences, School of
Computational Sciences, Center for Earth Observing and Space Research, George
Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA, 22030-4444, USA

Yinjie Yang Centre for Computational Intelligence, De Montfort University, The
Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK

Sisi Zlatanova Delft University of Technology, OTB Research Institute for
Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies, Jaffalaan 9, 2628 BX Delft, PO Box 5030,
2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands
Acknowledgements

It is always exciting and great responsibility to prepare a book which lays a claim
to such an ambitious title. It is exciting because one can let the imagination rather
than practical nitty gritty to guide the thoughts. It is also a great responsibility as
most information is required to be accurate and representative of the entire
spectrum of the presented topic.
Geographic Information Technologies are now an integral part of many
decision making processes in modern society ranging from urban planning to
military ventures. The computing technologies also seem to have reached a state
of maturity whereby we have sufficient experience of the past and the awareness
of the challenges facing us in the future. Hence, a book which presents an account of
the prominent ideas that might be going to occupy future intellectual and commercial
ventures is timely. However, just like any other multi-party efforts of this kind it
wasn’t always plain sailing from the beginning. It was felt by Sanjay from the
beginning that this book requires a co-editor in order to remain balanced. Sanjay
first floated the idea of book in the mid- 2001 but it fizzled out quickly due to the
lack of enthusiasm from the early collaborators. However later that year, Simon
Doyle showed a bit more interest and wrote a one-page proposal with Sanjay
briefly outlining the objectives of the book. Sanjay would like to thank Simon for
those constructive brainstorming sessions. Sadly, this partnership couldn’t last
long due to Simon’s busy corporate schedule. Sanjay then threw the idea around
again eventually teaming up with Jayant in 2002 and the formal manuscript
preparation started in mid 2003. The next big task was to collect some
authoritative chapters which could provide sufficient depth and outlook so as to
come up to the rather ambitious book title. However, being an edited book has the
disadvantage that it doesn’t appeal to big names due to the rather low impact in
research funding scenario. Therefore, following several apologies and excellent
discussions from mentors such as Alan MacEachren, the first set of 11 chapters
were commissioned. Since then 3 more chapters were added to broaden the scope
of the book. We are grateful to all the authors for responding to the call despite the
hectic schedules and sticking to the deadline.
We are also grateful to Kurt Buehler for writing the foreword. The support
and patience of Springer-Verlag book editor Wolfgang Engel and assistants
Susanna Pohl and Helen Rachner were also fundamental to keep the project alive
and on track. We would like to thank the referees of the chapters, namely Allan
Doyle, Claire Ellul, Lars Bodum, Laxmi Subramanian, and Young-Hoon Kim who
helped us in evaluating the manuscripts and spared us time to work on the overall
book layout. Many of the colour images have been taken from various personal
and official websites. We are thankful to all the organisations and individuals
for their generosity. We thank David Unwin and Ian Fieggen for their constructive
comments at various stages of the book.
Foreword

Emerging from the collective experiences of millions of people who rely on
geospatial information and technology everyday, knowingly or not, are many
challenges and issues for the community of GIScience and GeoComputation
researchers. There are enough problems to go around and, thankfully, there are
also enough intelligent people around (or in training) to solve the issue and
challenges that we face as a society in our quest to make decisions better,
understanding deeper, profits greater, and our environment more sustainable.
Jayant and Sanjay have assembled an astounding array of knowledgeable authors
to present the broad frontier of geographic information technology that is
emerging to address these many issues and challenges. They have correctly
identified that the current state of geographic information technology consists of
geographic information(GI), GI hardware, and GI software and that the current state
has been heavily influenced by the IT industry and by the needs of society over
time. This is as it should be. In fact, while reading the chapters of this book, I
suggest that you keep a mental map of the relationship of the topics being
discussed with this “data, hardware, software” classification and with the
additional classification of technologies into those of data collection and handling
(to include information creation and management), analysis (to include modeling,
simulation, and knowledge generation and synthesis), and visualization (to include
all forms of presentation with the goal of understanding). This helped me to
organize my thoughts and to make the book a truly exciting reading experience.
When reading the chapter on autonomous systems control, my mental
map yielded applications of automatic information generation using sensor
systems mounted on visually impaired humans (right here on earth) as discussed
in the chapter on multimodal interfaces and I could foresee a future where safe and
effective wayfinding was made possible. When reading the chapters on distributed
GI services and the geospatial grid, I kept flashing over to the chapters on agent
technology and the semantic grid and to the issues presented there and to the
promise of solutions emerging that will make “distributed geospatial semantic web
grid services” a reality. My mind then went to the issues of privacy, solved by the
application of appropriate IT technologies, and then to the inversion of the
GeoICT pyramid and I visualized a society where local data is collected, stored,
documented, and semantically described by local people and local government
into a 3D, ontology-capable DBMS. I then thought of how this new database was
exposed on the distributed geospatial semantic web grid (using standards-based
interfaces and ontologies) where it was analyzed using agent-based models
developed by “higher” levels of Government and effectively combined with data
resources of many other local entities to provide a solution of a regionally-serving
business leader trying to decide where to site his next facility to maximize his
profit or by a state-level decision makers trying to decide how to more effectively
manage their ever-more-precious land resources. Finally, I could see where
xii Foreword
augmented reality could help these decision makers interpret the results of
analyses by presenting them with a picture of the future overlain on the present.
Combining the ideas in the book to form a picture of the future is the job
of every reader, but beyond that, it is the responsibility of each of us to grasp one
of the unexplored or less understood topics and further refine and contribute to the
advancement therein for society, for science, and/or for profit. This book
wonderfully sets the stage for all of us in the GIScience and GeoComputation
domains and provides us with many possibilities for advancement. Please join me
and the editors and authors in this volume in helping to expand the frontiers of
geographic information technology.

Kurt Buehler
President, Image Matters LLC
Co-founder Open Geospatial Consortium