Computers, Society, and Nature

Any one who is facing dilemma about the above question should see the following video from 44:20 onward: Data Structures and Algorithms – Richard Buckland on YouTube Actually the entire video is very useful for anyone who is interested in understanding the basic of Complexity of Algorithms. - Dipto Sarkar

Robert Lake levels a scathing postpositivist criticism of GIS, as he sees it in the early 1990s, as being fundamentally ethically flawed.  His major ethical sticking point is that the underlying positivist data and analysis models of GIS by necessity objectify the subjects of research and are unable “to comprehend and respect the subjective differences [...]

Hedley et al’s 2002 article highlights the state of the art in augmented reality (AR) applications in geovisualization and multi-party collaboration.  Emphasizing a multidisciplinary approach encompassing computer science, human-computer interaction and geovisualization, the authors describe their 3D AR PRISM interface and its successor, the GI2VIZ interface.  Important features of the interfaces they design are representation [...]

After reading the paper by Azuma et. al., I am convinced of the fact that augmented reality systems of the likes shown in Science Fiction Movies are not far. However, I think the first commercial applications of Augmented Reality will use the mobile phones as the primary device. The mobile phones are already equipped with [...]

Here is a video link explaining scale from Youtube: Hope you all enjoy the awkward scale guy! C_N_Cycles

I am late to post and I think everyone else has already posted lots of excellent ideas about these topics! I found the spatial data mining article very interesting. I think that statistical modeling and machine learning are two disciplines which share a lot in common and in some cases may even be redundant versions [...]

I appreciate the title of JMonterey’s blog! Spatial data mining, as described in the article by Shekhar et al., seems exactly like extracting precious resources out of the underground or a kind of ‘homogeneous’ set of data. The article gives great examples of the type of ‘gold’ that we can get from the data mining processes [...]

I found myself more interested in what you guys had to say about scale than the texts! or at least more inspired… One point that is really interesting is that we have fancy techniques to choose a right scale to study a problem but in the end, the scale problem persists. Here again I think [...]

Guo and Mennis outline the emerging field of spatial data mining for the introduction to a special journal issue.  Work in this field has been prompted by the ever-increasing availability of finer and finer grained data, from an exponentially increasing number of sensors ranging from satellites to cell phones to surveillance cameras.  There has been [...]

The article “Spatial Data Mining, by Shashi Shekhar, explains what data mining is and how it has made great strides across various categories such as location prediction, spatial outlier detection, co-location mining, and clustering.  Data mining is finding meaningful patterns or information in data from a large data set that would otherwise have been imperceptible. This [...]

As a geographer, Danielle Marceau’s article “The scale issue in social and natural sciences” is easily digestible. Familiar concepts such as the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) are presented in a very clear manner. The article focuses mainly on the effects of scale and aggregates on spatial inferences, and on linking sptial patterns and processes [...]

Unlike some other fields in GIScience, advances in spatial data mining and geographic knowledge discovery are not only needed, but time sensitive. The rate at which data is collected and produced is accelerating with little end in sight. This is not due only to the number of observations, but the number of times an observation [...]

Atkinson and Tate make a good point. I only wish I could find it. Their extensive use of mathematics is daunting, but a necessary evil when understanding what goes on under the hood of ArcGIS. With no personal experience in the matter, a quick Google search yielded that Variograms are the same, if not similar, [...]

There is no doubt that scale plays a large role in the way in which data is interpreted. The article by Atkinson and Tate provide a good overview of scale of measurement, scales of spatial variation, and the issues inherent to spatial data. However, if we draw from Kathryn’s seminar about spatial statistics, and realize [...]

Spatial data mining relies on the geographic attributes of the data to uncover spatial relationships within the dataset leading to knowledge discovery.  No doubt that if implemented successfully, then it has contributed to developing spatial theories, and contributing to geographic research. It’s a science! The authors contend that with the increasing contribution of volunteered geographic [...]

Shekhar et al. describe spatial data mining—the process of finding notable patterns in spatial data—and they outline models of doing so, as well as using spatial outliers and spatial co-location rules, and locating spatial clusters. The article is mostly informative, and the topic is central to spatial analysis, so it is difficult to separate spatial [...]

Marceau’s sums up issues pertaining to the variability in scale including scale dependence, scale domains and scale thresholds. At the crux of the article is an illustration of “a shift in paradigm where entities, patterns and processes are considered as intrinsically linked to the particular scale at which they can be distinguished and defined” (Marceau [...]

In working on my final project, I picked up a copy of “How to Lie With Maps” by Mark Monmonier at the library. I haven’t gotten too far into the book, but its concept, of the way that maps are always more complex than they look on the outside, provides a useful starting point for [...]

Scale is an important issue in regards to most academic investigations, particularly within the framework of the investigation of natural phenomena. The biggest problem when dealing with these phenomena, especially environmental problems, is that these occurrences happen at various levels of scale. In addition, a single phenomena might have a particular effect on a local scale, but [...]

Guo and Mennis speak on how data information has increased in availability making it difficult to extract the useful data, however I believe that it not just a present day problem. To clarify, although data in many fields may have once been hard to access, some fields have had an over abundance of data for [...]