Figure 5: Data modeling from the real world to a database, and from there to digital cartographic models and analogue products for visualization.. Figure 20: Sample (a) region, (b) its binary array, (c) its maximal blocks, and (d) the corresponding quadtree (after SAMET 1990a). IX he first textbook on GIS was published in 1986. Today, we can find dozens of books dealing with GIS. Yet, it is dif...

he relationship between physical space and human cognition has a long history of relating the impact of spatial cues on information retrieval in multiple ways. In this position paper, three distinct problems are considered in terms of the how the mind organizes and retrieves information by location. Each of these is discussed, in turn, below. First and foremost, spatial location is one feature ...

3.1 INTRODUCTION " Geographic information science " has newly emerged as the study of basic and applied research issues involving geospatial information. This multidisciplinary field is concerned with the collection, storage, processing, analysis, and depiction and communication of digital information about spatiotemporal and thematic attributes of the earth, and the objects and events found th...

Geographic information systems are used to collect, analyze, and present information describing the physical and logical properties of the geographic world. Geographically refer-enced data is the spatial data that pertain to a location on the earth's surface. Using object-oriented database technology to model the real world. There are four major functional units in a typical geographic informat...

The Center for Geographic Information Science (CGISc) at the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG) was established in the Summer of 2006. CGISc is an educational research entity that relies on the use of GIS and the science of geographic information to conduct research on human and natural phenomena distributed on the Earth’s surface. CGISc welcomes interdisciplinary collaboration, and...

The processing steps required for geographic information retrieval include many steps that are common to all forms of information retrieval, e.g. stopword filtering, stemming, vocabulary enrichment, understanding Booleans, and fluff removal. Only a few steps, in particular the detection of geographic entities and the assignment of bounding boxes to these, are specific to geographic IR. The pape...

Users of geographic data may not be able to afford to purchase and implement a dataset that does not finally meet their needs. Therefore, metadata has a very important role in the information supply environment of geographic data. The development of national/local spatial data infrastructures recognizes the importance of metadata, as do the digital libraries providing spatial data. The new ISO ...

Ontologies need to introduce some primitive symbols used for the definition of more complex ones. These primitive symbols have no formal definitions in the ontology, and as ontologies usually are incomplete axiomatizations, the semantics of the primitives remain ambiguous (Guarino 1998). This shifts the problem of semantic interoperability to the problem of how to ground such primitives. Ground...

For decades, metadata has been the ever-present, cure-all solution to heterogeneous data integration and use. Yet, high-quality, ubiquitous metadata is extremely rare in practice. Current volunteered geographic information systems may provide insights on how the scientific community can produce and manage metadata for geospatial data infrastructures.