This study assesses whether there are differences in geographic access to and availability of a range of different amenities for a large group of persons diagnosed with severe mental illness (SMI) in Philadelphia (USA) when compared to a more general set of residential addresses. The 15,246 persons who comprised the study group had better outcomes than an equal number of geographical points rep...

In today's emergency management environments geoinformation technologies play a vital role, but their potential has not been fully exploited. Key decision makers usually do not have direct access to Geographic Information Systems and if they receive access, complex user interfaces often hinder performance for high pressure tasks. In order to provide decision makers with direct and easy access t...

Finding and accessing suitable geographic information to satisfy various applications in the open and distributed environments of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) is a crucial task. However, because of the semantic heterogeneity in conventional exploitations and descriptions of geographic information, it is difficult to find suitable geographic information which exactly meets the requirement...

The convergence of Earth-observing media, web technologies, and cheap, portable devices has resulted in an explosion of geographic information. Although powerful, the “geographic information universe” metaphor obfuscates the deeply social and political nature of the socio-technical systems in which the flood of geographic information is produced and consumed. Unlike the physical universe that e...

This work presents a mechanism that allows different community users access the same geographic database without knowing its particular internal structure. We use geographic ontologies to support a common and shared understanding of a specific domain: the coral reefs. Using these ontologies' descriptions that represent the knowledge of the different communities, mechanisms are created to handle...