Transcript Spatial Analysis in a Communicating World

Spatial Analysis in a
Communicating World
Michael F. Goodchild
University of California
Santa Barbara
The New Economy
• What are its fundamental principles?
• The computer as processing engine
– slave, servant, assistant, butler
• The computer as communication medium
– channel between sender and receiver
– almost all communication in digital form
The Communication Metaphor
• Changing focus of concern
– from MIPS, MHz, GB, functionality
– to bandwidth, latency, thick or thin clients
– to interoperability and shared semantics
• The Tower of Babel allegory
– search processes, distributed systems,
dissemination
– assessment of quality, fitness for use, branding
– intellectual property, liability
Addressing the concerns of
MMQM
• Mathematical, quantitative
• Strong link to GIS
– Taylor's 1991 critique
• Comparable SGs
– GIS
– Microcomputers
– Cartography
Three Major Points
• Implications of the communication
metaphor
• Augmentations of reality
• Mathematical models
The rise of digital technology
• Economic engine
• Digital transition
– precise
– accurate
– pervasive
Geologic mapping catches the
digital virus
Field
geologist
Archivist
Cartographer
Users
Printer
Distributor
Collectors
Librarians
Impacts on mapping
• Cheap and affordable software and sensors
– precision agriculture
– city street maps
• From central to local production
• From radial to networked dissemination
Maps as media
• Visual
– not spoken, acoustic,
tactile, olfactory
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Flat
Exhaustive
Uniform scale
Static
• Strong economies of
scale
– multipurpose
– shared perspective
• Precise
– little portrayal of
uncertainty
• Slow
The Communication Metaphor
• Geographic information
– <x,z>
– at 34N, 120W at noon PDT on 4/6/00 the air
temperature is 23C
– it's warm today in Santa Barbara
– precise world of scientific measurement
– vague world of human discourse
It's warm in
Santa
Barbara
Spoken word
Text
Picture
x, y, T
Engaging with the Vague World
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Spatial reasoning
Wayfinding
The GIScience agenda
Precise communication filters and imposes
Spatial analysis of vague information
– reasoning with fuzzy sets
Comparing Paradigms
• Old: vague world has no relevance to
science or spatial analysis
– must change ways of thinking, work with
concepts that are not intuitive
• New: vague and precise both have
importance in appropriate contexts
– engagement essential
– modeling, reasoning, analysis under uncertainty
Augmenting Reality
• G-commerce
– e-commerce that is geographically enabled
• Geographically enabling the Internet
• ALI
– technologies that know where they are
• Field technologies
– individual-level geographic data
– extending the senses
Mathematical Models
• Communication of geographic knowledge
– printed word
– data dissemination
• Supporting other kinds of knowledge
– infrastructure for models
– learning about process
Mathematical and Computational
Models
• PDE to finite difference approximations
• Models that are fundamentally
computational
– cellular automata
• Problems with geographic derivatives
– slope in GIS
Concluding Comments
• This is a new world
– competing for people's attention
– new opportunities
• Analysis as enhancement of communication
– revealing the invisible
– creating new information
– engagement with the human world
Concluding Comments (2)
• New opportunities for modeling
– computer objects that produce transformations
– Java code
• Renaming MMQM