Spatial join is the most expensive operation in geographic databases, but essentially important to compute spatial relationships intrinsic to geographic data. In account of spatial relationships real world entities may affect the behavior of other entities in the neighborhood. Spatial relationships are fundamental for knowledge discovery in geographic databases and are strongly related to the d...

Social disorganization theories and systemic reformulations provide some of the most compelling and enduring explanations for the development, persistence, and geographic distribution of gang behaviors. Since Thrasher’s (1927) seminal study, generations of researchers have conceived of gangs and gang behaviors as the product of social dislocations associated with urban life, including poverty, ...

BACKGROUND The food environment can have an important influence on the availability of and access to food, which plays a significant role in the health of individuals. The goal of this study was to compare the consumption of fruits, legumes and vegetables (FLV) by adults and the availability of food stores in the context of socioeconomic and geographic space connected to basic health units in a...

Rapid urbanization has accelerated land use and land cover changes, and generated the urban heat island effect (UHI). Previous studies have reported positive effects of neighborhood landscapes on mitigating urban surface temperatures. However, the influence of neighborhood landscape spatial patterns on enhancing cooling effects has not yet been fully investigated. The main objective of this stu...

BACKGROUND The effect of neighborhood and healthcare access factors on cancer outcomes among patients enrolled in navigator programs is not clearly understood. This study assessed associations between: (i) neighborhood factors and diagnostic time to resolution (TTR) and (ii) geographic access and TTR following an abnormal breast or cervical cancer screening test among women participating in the...

This work proposes a new approach to couple Aedes aegypti population dynamic models with local scale spatially-explicit computational models for the Geographical Space. A geographic database was developed for a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, RJ, and used to estimate the spatial pattern of mosquito infestation to estimate areas of epidemic risk.

The methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) clone sequence type (ST) 398 has increasingly been identified as a pathogen in diverse geographic settings, yet its epidemiology remains incompletely understood. In this case-control study of MSSA infections, we identified ST398 MSSA as both a major community- and hospital-associated MSSA pathogen in the Dominican neighborhood of northern...

This paper summarizes recent efforts in the use of automation to create geographic immersive virtual environments on a testbed of the University of California, Santa Barbara campus and nearby neighborhood of Isla Vista. In particular, we discuss how aerial LiDAR point clouds can be processed and fused with aerial video sources, and distributed on the web via the X3D language.