22,896 research outputs found
Ranking Spaces for Predicting Human Movement in an Urban Environment
A city can be topologically represented as a connectivity graph, consisting
of nodes representing individual spaces and links if the corresponding spaces
are intersected. It turns out in the space syntax literature that some defined
topological metrics can capture human movement rates in individual spaces. In
other words, the topological metrics are significantly correlated to human
movement rates, and individual spaces can be ranked by the metrics for
predicting human movement. However, this correlation has never been well
justified. In this paper, we study the same issue by applying the weighted
PageRank algorithm to the connectivity graph or space-space topology for
ranking the individual spaces, and find surprisingly that (1) the PageRank
scores are better correlated to human movement rates than the space syntax
metrics, and (2) the underlying space-space topology demonstrates small world
and scale free properties. The findings provide a novel justification as to why
space syntax, or topological analysis in general, can be used to predict human
movement. We further conjecture that this kind of analysis is no more than
predicting a drunkard's walking on a small world and scale free network.
Keywords: Space syntax, topological analysis of networks, small world, scale
free, human movement, and PageRankComment: 11 pages, 5 figures, and 2 tables, English corrections from version 1
to version 2, major changes in the section of introduction from version 2 to
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
The visual preferences for forest regeneration and field afforestation : four case studies in Finland
The overall aim of this dissertation was to study the public's preferences for forest regeneration fellings and field afforestations, as well as to find out the relations of these preferences to landscape management instructions, to ecological healthiness, and to the contemporary theories for predicting landscape preferences. This dissertation includes four case studies in Finland, each based on the visualization of management options and surveys.
Guidelines for improving the visual quality of forest regeneration and field afforestation are given based on the case studies. The results show that forest regeneration can be connected to positive images and memories when the regeneration area is small and some time has passed since the felling. Preferences may not depend only on the management alternative itself but also on the viewing distance, viewing point, and the scene in which the management options are implemented.
The current Finnish forest landscape management guidelines as well as the ecological healthiness of the studied options are to a large extent compatible with the public's preferences. However, there are some discrepancies. For example, the landscape management instructions as well as ecological hypotheses suggest that the retention trees need to be left in groups, whereas people usually prefer individually located retention trees to those trees in groups. Information and psycho-evolutionary theories provide some possible explanations for people's preferences for forest regeneration and field afforestation, but the results cannot be consistently explained by these theories.
The preferences of the different stakeholder groups were very similar. However, the preference ratings of the groups that make their living from forest - forest owners and forest professionals - slightly differed from those of the others. These results provide support for the assumptions that preferences are largely consistent at least within one nation, but that knowledge and a reference group may also influence preferences.Väitöskirjassa tutkittiin ihmisten maisemapreferenssejä (maisemallisia arvostuksia) metsänuudistamishakkuiden ja pellonmetsitysten suhteen sekä analysoitiin näiden preferenssien yhteyksiä maisemanhoito-ohjeisiin, vaihtoehtojen ekologiseen terveyteen ja preferenssejä ennustaviin teorioihin. Väitöskirja sisältää neljä tapaustutkimusta, jotka perustuvat hoitovaihtoehtojen visualisointiin ja kyselytutkimuksiin.
Tapaustutkimusten pohjalta annetaan ohjeita siitä, kuinka uudistushakkuiden ja pellonmetsitysten visuaalista laatua voidaan parantaa. Väitöskirjan tulokset osoittavat, että uudistamishakkuut voivat herättää myös myönteisiä mielikuvia ja muistoja, jos uudistusala on pieni ja hakkuun välittömät jäljet ovat jo peittyneet. Preferensseihin vaikuttaa hoitovaihtoehdon lisäksi mm. katseluetäisyys, katselupiste ja ympäristö, jossa vaihtoehto on toteutettu.
Eri viiteryhmien (metsäammattilaiset, pääkaupunkiseudun asukkaat, ympäristönsuojelijat, tutkimusalueiden matkailijat, paikalliset asukkaat sekä metsänomistajat) maisemapreferenssit olivat hyvin samankaltaisia. Kuitenkin ne ryhmät, jotka saavat ainakin osan elannostaan metsästä - metsänomistajat ja metsäammattilaiset - pitivät metsänhakkuita esittävistä kuvista hieman enemmän kuin muut ryhmät. Nämä tulokset tukevat oletusta, että maisemapreferenssit ovat laajalti yhteneväisiä ainakin yhden kansan tai kulttuurin keskuudessa, vaikka myös viiteryhmä saattaa vaikuttaa preferensseihin jonkin verran.
Nykyiset metsämaisemanhoito-ohjeet ovat pitkälti samankaltaisia tässä väitöskirjassa havaittujen maisemapreferenssien kanssa. Myöskään tutkittujen vaihtoehtoisten hoitotapojen ekologisen paremmuuden ja niihin kohdistuvien maisemallisten arvostusten välillä ei ollut suurta ristiriitaa. Kuitenkin joitakin eroavaisuuksia oli; esimerkiksi sekä maisemanhoito-ohjeiden että ekologisten hypoteesien mukaan säästöpuut tulisi jättää ryhmiin, kun taas ihmiset pitivät eniten yksittäin jätetyistä puista. Informaatiomalli ja psyko-evolutionaarinen teoria tarjoavat mahdollisia selityksiä uudistushakkuisiin ja pellonmetsitykseen kohdistuville preferensseille, vaikkakaan tutkimuksen tuloksia ei voida täysin selittää näillä teorioilla
Spatial ability, urban wayfinding and location-based services:a review and first results
Location-Based Services (LBS) are a new industry at the core of which are GISand spatial databases. With increasing mobility of individuals, the anticipatedavailability of broadband communications for mobile devices and growingvolumes of location specific information available in databases there willinevitably be an increase in demand for services providing location relatedinformation to people on the move. New Information and CommunicationTechnologies (NICTs) are providing enhanced possibilities for navigating ?smartcities?. Urban environments, meanwhile, have increasing spatial complexity.Navigating urban environments is becoming an important issue. The time is ripefor a re-appraisal of urban wayfinding. This paper critically reviews the currentLBS applications and raises a series of questions with regard to LBS for urbanwayfinding. Research is being carried out to measure individuals? spatialability/awareness and their degree of preference for using LBS in wayfinding. Themethodology includes both the use of questionnaires and a virtual reality CAVE.Presented here are the results of the questionnaire survey which indicate therelationships between individuals? spatial ability, use of NICTs and modepreference for receiving wayfinding cues. Also discussed are our future researchdirections on LBS, particular on issues of urban wayfinding using NICTs
Using Incomplete Information for Complete Weight Annotation of Road Networks -- Extended Version
We are witnessing increasing interests in the effective use of road networks.
For example, to enable effective vehicle routing, weighted-graph models of
transportation networks are used, where the weight of an edge captures some
cost associated with traversing the edge, e.g., greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
or travel time. It is a precondition to using a graph model for routing that
all edges have weights. Weights that capture travel times and GHG emissions can
be extracted from GPS trajectory data collected from the network. However, GPS
trajectory data typically lack the coverage needed to assign weights to all
edges. This paper formulates and addresses the problem of annotating all edges
in a road network with travel cost based weights from a set of trips in the
network that cover only a small fraction of the edges, each with an associated
ground-truth travel cost. A general framework is proposed to solve the problem.
Specifically, the problem is modeled as a regression problem and solved by
minimizing a judiciously designed objective function that takes into account
the topology of the road network. In particular, the use of weighted PageRank
values of edges is explored for assigning appropriate weights to all edges, and
the property of directional adjacency of edges is also taken into account to
assign weights. Empirical studies with weights capturing travel time and GHG
emissions on two road networks (Skagen, Denmark, and North Jutland, Denmark)
offer insight into the design properties of the proposed techniques and offer
evidence that the techniques are effective.Comment: This is an extended version of "Using Incomplete Information for
Complete Weight Annotation of Road Networks," which is accepted for
publication in IEEE TKD
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