Spatio-temporal GIS Design for Exploring Interactions of Human Activities

Designing a GIS data model that can help analyze spatial and temporal patterns and interactions of human activities presents a challenging research topic. Due to a growing adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in today’s society, an increasing number of human activities are performed in the virtual space. This paper presents a spatio-temporal GIS design to support exploratory analysis of interactions among human activities in both physical and virtual spaces. The conceptual framework extends the space-time path concept of Hägerstrand’s time geography to represent both physical and virtual activities. Linear referencing and dynamic segmentation are employed in the design to dynamically locate physical and virtual activities on space-time paths. The system design also supports analysis functions to explore four different types of human interactions: co-location in space, co-location in time, co-existence, and no co-location requirement in either space or time. A prototype system based on a sample data set is implemented as a 3D GIS (i.e., 2D space + 1D time) in the ArcGIS environment. This paper demonstrates the feasibility and potential of applying temporal GIS concepts to extend Hagerstrand’s time-geographic framework for representation and analysis of human interactions in both physical and virtual spaces. The proposed GIS framework can be useful in applications such as location-based services (LBS), modeling spread of infectious diseases, and tracking terrorist activities.