Geovisualization of knowledge diffusion: Visualization of bibliographic data 1995-2009

Bibliometrics are an important research area within information and library science, which provides valuable insights about relationships between authors, publications, and knowledge domains. This study examined the geographic aspects of literature involving the visualization of bibliographic data published by authors residing in the contiguous United States. It determined where visualization of bibliometric research occurred and explored the spatial relationships among its contributors via institutional affiliation. The study involved five aspects: (1) cited publications, (2) citing publications, (3) cited-citing publication networks, (4) co-author networks and distances, and (5) hypothesis testing of average co-author distances over time. Using 102 publications identified from Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science in the field of visualization of bibliographic data, it demonstrated that spatial aspects of bibliographic data can be represented in ArcGIS as both points (institutions) and networks (cited-citing pairs). The study examined clustering of the bibliographic data based institutional affiliation (i.e., ZIP code) using a nearest neighbor analysis. A Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) script was used to create polylines for cited-citing publication and co-author networks. The networks were mapped using small multiples and animation. Average co-author distances were calculated for the co-author networks and temporal changes were explored formally using a nonparametric hypothesis test. The average nearest neighbor analysis found that both cited and citing publications involving visualization of bibliographic data were clustered. Visual inspection of the thematic maps showed clustering of both cited and citing maps concentrated in the following cities: Philadelphia, PA, Bloomington, IN, Sandia, NM, Stillwater, OK, and Tucson, AZ. Despite a statistically significant increase in the number co-authored publications on visualization of bibliographic data, there was no change in the average co-author distances from 2001-2009

Web GIS to support irrigation management: a prototype for SAGRA network, Alentejo Portugal

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesAn efficient water management, not only allows significant savings in costs of irrigation, but also an effective control on the quality of products, which can have obvious consequences on income operation and reducing the environmental impact of irrigation. As the Internet is becoming the easiest way of information distribution, irrigation management system can also be benefitted with it. Integrating GIS functionality with internet capacity will redefine the way of decision making, sharing and processing of information. In irrigation systems weather plays an imperative role in decision making, implementing and forecasting. Temperature, humidity, precipitation, and solar radiation are the most important parameters to calculate evapotranspiration by which crop water requirement can be determined. SAGRA (Sistema Agrometeorológico para a Gestão da Rega no Alentejo) network is providing information to the farmers through web but still lacks the use of GIS in their information to decision support system. Irrigation management support system can be benefitted with the use of Web GIS. In this thesis, web based GIS is designed using popular open source tools and software. Using data from automatic weather station maps are produced using Geo-statistical interpolation techniques and published in web map. These maps can be viewed with popular online maps like Google maps, Microsoft Bing and Openstreet maps. Animated weather maps are also created which are useful for visualizing changing pattern of weather parameters and water requirement over time

Représentations graphiques et indicateurs des mobilités et des dynamiques de peuplement : contribution bibliographique

La Base Endnote sera adressée à toute personne en faisant la demande auprès de Françoise Dureau : [email protected] main goal of the MOBIDYC research project (Mobilities and population movement: graphics and indicators) was to contribute to the definition of processing sequences that integrate both temporal and spatial dimensions of information related to spatial mobility (be it migration, residential mobility or daily mobility). Workshops were held on a quarterly basis to bring team members together. Between meetings, members worked separately on their own datasets. A first workshop was dedicated to the sharing of experience from previous work by members of the team. Then we focused on inventorying other experiences through bibliographic research. The aim of this article is to make the results of this research available to the scientific community. After stating the whys and hows of the collection of this bibliographic corpus, we present the material in the appendix: an Endnote set of references, along with a descriptive table synthesizing the content of these references. Finally, we present the main lessons we have learned through the analysis of this bibliographic corpus and from tests we carried out based on the methods described in the literature.L'objectif général du projet MOBIDYC (Mobilités et dynamiques de peuplement : représentations graphiques et production d'indicateurs) était d'avancer dans la définition de chaînes de traitement de l'information sur les mobilités spatiales (biographies migratoires et résidentielles, trajectoires de mobilité quotidienne) intégrant les deux dimensions, temporelles et spatiales, de l'information. La méthode de travail a consisté en un atelier réunissant les membres de l'équipe à un rythme trimestriel ; entre les séances de l'atelier, les chercheurs impliqués dans le projet ont travaillé en parallèle sur leurs corpus de données respectifs. Après une première étape consacrée à la mutualisation de nos expériences respectives, l'accent a été mis sur la recherche bibliographique et la recension des expériences dans le champ du projet. L'objectif de cet article est de mettre à disposition de la communauté scientifique le résultat de ce travail bibliographique. Après avoir rappelé les objectifs et conditions de réalisation de la base de données bibliographiques, nous présentons les informations mises à disposition en annexes de cet article : tableau de description synthétique des références bibliographiques, et la base Endnote des références . Enfin, nous livrons les principaux enseignements que nous avons tirés de l'analyse de ce corpus bibliographique, et des tests effectués à partir des méthodes identifiées dans la littérature

Virtual Campus for the University of Jaume I, Castelló, Spain: 3D Modelling of the Campus Buildings using CityEngine

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.The Virtual Smart Campus for the University of Jaume I – Visca Uji – is a project that aims to transform the University of Jaume I (UJi) into a “Smart Campus”. Several applications are part of the Smart Campus such as Uji Place Finder, Energy Consumption, Routes, Resources Management, and Indoor Mapping. Part of this project is the creation of the 3D model of the university buildings using Esri software — City Engine. This study analysed two 3D modeling approaches: procedural modeling language (CGA Shape) and manual modeling. The first, Computer Generated Architecture (CGA) shape is an extension of set grammars that have been applied in CG successfully over the years. And the second, CityEngine offers a set of shape creation and editing tools that allows a more intuitive and pragmatic 3D modeling technique. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, overall creating a 3D model by using procedural modelling language showed to be the more efficient and pragmatic method

StudMap 3.0 : an interoperable web-based platform for geospatial data offers in academic life

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesGeographic Information Systems has now entered the realm of web and yields for feasible solutions to balance the technology offers with the users’ needs to share, access and explore the massive amounts of geodata available. Challenges occur when moving forward from old 2D platforms towards innovative and integrated webGIS systems that align functionality with the necessity to grant a complete understanding of the surrounding reality. 3D space responds to this but, however, stands only at the beginning of its era and cannot yet reach the development of 2D web integration. Research is now aiming at possible webGIS solutions to adapt to the special structure imposed by 3D data. In this context, this thesis focuses on designing an architecture for 2D and 3D geospatial data integration on a student-oriented web platform. This concept was further delivered and validated through a real case scenario – Studmap 3.0, a webGIS platform to serve the students of the University of Muenster in their academical life. The portal currently grants availability of geospatial data and web services of regional interest in a smart GIS environment that allows access and comparison of official services with own data. The implementation of Studmap 3.0 aided in the continuous improvement of the proposed architecture model and developed under a design science research cycle that reached its end once the final approval of its users was attained via a usability evaluation. Final strengths and drawbacks of the proposed architecture were ultimately identified together with an expert usability evaluation and a lab-based usability test of the resulting portal interface suitability for academic use. The results fall under the acceptable range with an 83.75 score for the System Usability Scale standardized questions when addressed to experts and a score of 83.87 when addressed to students. For the open-ended questions, the interface received an overall positive critique. A summary of future participants’ opinion on the benefits, drawbacks and proposed improvements was also delivered. Peers interested in similar concepts can use both this model and its final remarks as a reference for their work

Using GIS to map the spatial and temporal occurrence of cholera epidemic in Camaroon

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesGlobally, Cholera has been a major infectious disease due to its intercontinental, environmental and cultural factors. This study focused on evaluating the climatic and fresh water proximity factors influencing Cholera epidemic in Cameroon. To this effect, Cholera and climatic datasets in 2004, 2010, 2011 and 2012 to June 2013 were collected and mapped. Both high and low rainfall and temperature extremes were designated as promoters of V. Cholerae development and the highest cases were identified in the Littoral, Extreme North and Centre regions. Spatial autocorrelation using Local (Anselin) Moran I on Cholera cases revealed a cluster of Low-Low positive autocorrelation in Adamawa region in 2004, a High-High cluster of positive autocorrelation in the Littoral region and a Low-High negative autocorrelation in the South region in 2012, a Low-High negative autocorrelation in the South West region and a High-Low negative autocorrelation in the North West in 2013. Furthermore, using population numbers to count Cholera cases (prevalence) from 2010 to June 2013, Local Moran I results show a Low-Low cluster of positive autocorrelation in the South region, a Low-High negative autocorrelation in the North region and a High-Low negative autocorrelation in the Adamawa region in 2010, a High-Low negative spatial autocorrelation in the North region in 2011, a High-Low negative spatial autocorrelation in the South region in 2012 and a High-Low negative spatial autocorrelation in the North region in 2013. Spatial Poisson Regression analysis allowed concluding that Average Temperature, Distance to Streams, Population Distribution and Latitude are statistically significant predictors of increased Cholera cases, whereas Average Rainfall and Longitude are significant predictors of lower Cholera cases

The crossroads of GIS and health information: a workshop on developing a research agenda to improve cancer control

Cancer control researchers seek to reduce the burden of cancer by studying interventions, their impact in defined populations, and the means by which they can be better used. The first step in cancer control is identifying where the cancer burden is elevated, which suggests locations where interventions are needed. Geographic information systems (GIS) and other spatial analytic methods provide such a solution and thus can play a major role in cancer control. This report presents findings from a workshop held June 16–17, 2005, to bring together experts and stakeholders to address current issues in GIScience and cancer control. A broad range of areas of expertise and interest was represented, including epidemiology, geography, statistics, environmental health, social science, cancer control, cancer registry operations, and cancer advocacy. The goals of this workshop were to build consensus on important policy and research questions, identify roadblocks to future progress in this field, and provide recommendations to overcome these roadblocks

Assessing Social and Territorial Vulnerability on Real Estate Submarkets

The concept of social vulnerability is widely studied in literature in order to identify particularly socially fragile sectors of the population. For this purpose, several studies have adopted indexes to measure the economic and social conditions of the population. The aim of this paper is to investigate the link between social and territorial vulnerability and the real estate market, by means of an exploratory analysis related to the possibility that spatial analyses can help to identify spatial latent components and variables in the process of price determination. A three phase approach is proposed, using the geographical segmentation of Turin and its related submarkets as a case study. After the identification and analysis of a set of three social and territorial vulnerability indicators, a traditional hedonic approach was applied to measure their influence on property listing prices. Subsequently, spatial analyses were investigated to focus on the spatial components of the indicators and property prices; their spatial autocorrelation was measured and the presence of spatial dependence was taken into account by applying a spatial regression. Results demonstrated that two indicators were spatially correlated with property prices and had a significant and negative influence on them. The proposed approach may help not only to identify the most vulnerable urban areas characterized by the lowest property prices, but also to support the future modification to the actual geographical segmentation of Turin