From the Yuan’s article, he criticizes that the temporal GIS is not supporting properly the spatio-temporal modeling. He argues that the temporal database systems are being applied by time-stamping techniques to tables, attributes or values to incorporate time factor and therefore lack in proper application. I find this article interesting yet inappropriate.
This article is interesting in a sense that back in late 90’s, assuming from the range of dates of cited articles varies from late 80’s to mid 90’s, despite the lack of technologies that could have point out such problems in temporal GIS, yet he was able to pointed out and therefore one can only imagine the frustration when the methods were not appropriately applied and also the technology was not apt to well incorporate the temporal attribute as well at the time. Which leads to the reason why I call this article inappropriate, because it could have mislead to some people how temporal GIS is being not developed even today, whereas it is, at least in the perspective of technology, more than enough to be ready to be applied and being applied currently. It is all thanks to the advance in technology and crowd-sourcing. As Yuen have mentioned, “GIS will be more effective and precise by representing a fire, fire location, and how the fire spreads rather than burned areas at each point in time.” To relate to the example, nowadays, fire departments and natural scientists are closely monitoring the natural forest fire and the tracking, using temporal GIS. On the other hand, I find the burned areas at each point in time eventually leads to the evidences of fire spreads. However, it is facilitated by today’s technologies to create such connections whereas it was impossible to do so about 20 years ago. Hence, this article may be easily misleading or perhaps even confusing to people who are learning and being used to today’s GIScience technologies, especially without further information/background knowledge on TGIS.
-ESRI
Tags: GEOG 506, Temporal GIS, TGIS