A volume in the three-volume Remote Sensing Handbook series, Remote Sensing of Water Resources, Disasters, and Urban Studies documents the scientific and methodological advances that have taken place during the last 50 years. The other two volumes in the series are Remotely Sensed Data Characterization, Classification, and Accuracies, and Land Reso
The contributed volume collects cutting-edge research in GeoComputational Analysis of Regional Systems. The contributions emphasize methodological innovations or substantive breakthroughs on many facets of the socio-economic and environmental reality of regional contexts.
This aims to make the computing principles underlying geographic databases understandable and accessible to current and potential users of such systems. It overviews database system philosophy; describes database concepts eg storage, retrieval, architecture, conceptual modelling, and database querying.It then focuses on the characteristics of GIS, spatial data and spatial databases, concluding with a discussion of current/future research trends.
Accuracy assessment of maps derived from remotely sensed data has continued to grow since the first edition of this groundbreaking book. As a result, the much-anticipated new edition is significantly expanded and enhanced to reflect growth in the field. The new edition features three new chapters, including: Fuzzy accuracy assessmentPositional accu
The proliferation of massive data sets brings with it a series of special computational challenges. This "data avalanche" arises in a wide range of scientific and commercial applications. With advances in computer and information technologies, many of these challenges are beginning to be addressed by diverse inter-disciplinary groups, that indude computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians and engineers, working in dose cooperation with application domain experts. High profile applications indude astrophysics, bio-technology, demographics, finance, geographi cal information systems, government, medicine, telecommunications, the environment and the internet. John R. Tucker of the Board on Mathe matical Seiences has stated: "My interest in this problern (Massive Data Sets) isthat I see it as the rnost irnportant cross-cutting problern for the rnathernatical sciences in practical problern solving for the next decade, because it is so pervasive. " The Handbook of Massive Data Sets is comprised of articles writ ten by experts on selected topics that deal with some major aspect of massive data sets. It contains chapters on information retrieval both in the internet and in the traditional sense, web crawlers, massive graphs, string processing, data compression, dustering methods, wavelets, op timization, external memory algorithms and data structures, the US national duster project, high performance computing, data warehouses, data cubes, semi-structured data, data squashing, data quality, billing in the large, fraud detection, and data processing in astrophysics, air pollution, biomolecular data, earth observation and the environment.
In the past half century, we have experienced two major waves of methodological development in the study of human behavior in space and time. The fIrst wave was the well known "quantitative revolution" which propelled geography from a mainly descriptive discipline to a scientifIc discipline using formalism such as probability, statistics, and a large-number of mathematical methods for analyzing spatial structures and processes under certainty and uncertainty. The second wave is the recent advancement of geographical information systems which equips geographers with automation in the storage, retrieval, analysis, and display of data. Both developments have significant impacts on geographical studies in general and solutions to real life spatio-temporal problems in particular. They have found applications in urban and regional planning, automated mapping and facilities management, transportation planning and management, as well as environmental planning and management, to name but a few examples. Both developments have one thing in common. They one way or the other use computer to process and analyze data. However, not until recently, there has been very little interaction between the two. Quantitative models have largely been developed independent of the underlying data models and structures representing the spatial phenomena or processes under study. Display of analysis results has been primitive in terms of the utilization of computer graphic technologies. Formal models, in addition to their technical difficulties, have poor capability in communication with users. Geographical information systems, on the other hand, have originally been developed with a slight intention to entertain powerful analytical models.
This Handbook is an essential reference and a guide to the rapidly expanding field of Geographic Information Science. Designed for students and researchers who want an in-depth treatment of the subject, including background information Comprises around 40 substantial essays, each written by a recognized expert in a particular area Covers the full spectrum of research in GIS Surveys the increasing number of applications of GIS Predicts how GIS is likely to evolve in the near future
