13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017)

COSIT 2017 is the latest edition of the conference series on spatial information theory that has been bringing together leading researchers of the field for more than twenty years now. On its trajectory through time and space, the conference has returned to where it started: Italy. This year, it is held at L’Aquila, the capital city of the Abruzzo region, in Central Italy. The beauty of the city and the region is matched by the diversity and quality of the paper selected for presentation. In total, we received 51 submissions that were then reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Based on the reviews, 22 papers were selected to be presented at the main conference and are included in this volume. A quick look at the table of contents is enough to appreciate the breadth and diversity of the topics covered by the articles included in the proceedings. In addition to well-established topics, such as qualitative reasoning, spatial semantics, and wayfinding, the trend towards tackling the fundamental theoretical issues inherent to crowd-sourced spatial information continues from previous COSIT conferences. As it happens at COSIT, there are atypical topics being discussed, such as the interesting foray into a quantum theory applied to geographic fields. Overall, the program provides rich contributions for researchers in the key sub-domains of spatial information theory while at the same time extending the scientific scope of the field. As in previous years, the main single-track program is complemented by satellite events. First of all, an intensive poster session gives the opportunity especially to young researchers to present their work to the community in a designated session. Preceding the single-track program, COSIT 2017 offers five workshops covering hot and emerging topics in spatial information theory, such as ‘rethinking wayfinding support systems’ and ‘future directions in geospatial natural language research’. In addition, two tutorials are offered as well as the doctoral colloquium. The proceedings of the satellite events are available as a separate publication. Three keynotes complement the technical program: by Sang Ah Lee on a neuroscientist point of view on spatial cognition, by Stefano Borgo on the formalization of spatial environments of artificial agents, and by Bin Jiang on scaling and order in geographic space. Last but not least, COSIT 2017 also hosts several social events facilitating informal exchanges. Organizing an event such as COSIT and making it a success is only possible with the help and commitment of many people. The program committee plays a pivotal role in ensuring a quality program, and we would like to thank all reviewers for their time and for the thorough reviews they produced. We would like to thank the University of L’Aquila that hosts the conference, offering the location and technical and logistic support, in addition to a financial contribution. For the first time, this year COSIT is an IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) supported conference and an AICA (Italian Association for Informatics and Automatic Calculus) supported conference with no financial involvement of IFIP and AICA. Finally, we would like to thank all who attended COSIT 2017 to present their work, to discuss the work showcased at the conference and beyond, and to advance the state of the art in the field of spatial information theory

Special issue on spatio-temporal theories and models for environmental, urban and social sciences: where do we stand ?

This extensive editorial of this special journal issue follows a workshop organized in conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2013) in September 2013 in Scarborough, UK. The objective of this international workshop was to bring together representatives from these different disciplinary communities, and integrate academics, students, and practitioners for a one-day workshop on spatiotemporal concepts and theories. This editorial introduces the special issue, the research objectives the workshop followed and some of the main contributions as well as the theoretical achievements and research perspectives left

Automatic grounding of vague geographic ontology in data

In constructing an ontological theory of a domain such as geography, it is important not only to take account of the vagueness and ambiguity which is inherent in many of the relevant concepts, but also to be able to relate the high-level definitions of the theory to actual sets of data of varying kinds. Any attempt to ignore or remove vagueness and ambiguity risks errors and conflict in the ontological theory with the knowledge of different domain experts, while an inability to ground the theory in real data limits its practical use. We present here a means of structuring such a theory to handle these issues in a principled manner, which lends itself to concrete implementation. We illustrate with reference to several examples from the domain of hydrography

Defining and Generating Axial Lines from Street Center Lines for better Understanding of Urban Morphologies

Axial lines are defined as the longest visibility lines for representing individual linear spaces in urban environments. The least number of axial lines that cover the free space of an urban environment or the space between buildings constitute what is often called an axial map. This is a fundamental tool in space syntax, a theory developed by Bill Hillier and his colleagues for characterizing the underlying urban morphologies. For a long time, generating axial lines with help of some graphic software has been a tedious manual process that is criticized for being time consuming, subjective, or even arbitrary. In this paper, we redefine axial lines as the least number of individual straight line segments mutually intersected along natural streets that are generated from street center lines using the Gestalt principle of good continuity. Based on this new definition, we develop an automatic solution to generating the newly defined axial lines from street center lines. We apply this solution to six typical street networks (three from North America and three from Europe), and generate a new set of axial lines for analyzing the urban morphologies. Through a comparison study between the new axial lines and the conventional or old axial lines, and between the new axial lines and natural streets, we demonstrate with empirical evidence that the newly defined axial lines are a better alternative in capturing the underlying urban structure. Keywords: Space syntax, street networks, topological analysis, traffic, head/tail division ruleComment: 10 pages, 7 figures, and 2 tables, one figure added + minor revisio