Mining Spatial Patterns of Distribution of Uranium in Surface and Ground Waters in Ukraine

A variety of geovisualization and spatial statistical methods can reveal spatial patterns in the distribution of chemical elements in surface and groundwater, and also identify major factors which define those patterns. This chapter describes a combination of modeling techniques to enhance understanding of large-scale spatial distribution of uranium in groundwater in Ukraine, by linking spatial patterns of several indicators and predictors. Factor, correlation, and regression analysis, including their spatial implementations, were used to describe the impacts of several environmental variables on spatial distribution of uranium. Local factor analysis (or Geographically Weighted Factor Analysis, GWFA) was proposed to identify major environmental factors which define the distribution of uranium, and to discover and map their spatial relationships. The study resulted in a series of maps to help visualize and explore the relationships between uranium and several environmental indicators.

Urban Master Data Management

The use of information technology in council management has resulted in the generation of a large amount of data through various autonomous urban bodies. The relevant bodies barely or never reuse such locally-generated data. This may be due particularly to managers', policy makers' and users' lack of awareness of existing information. The Platform for the Integration and Interoperability of the Yaounde Urban Information Systems (YUSIIP) project seeks to reduce this deficit by establishing a federated operational platform of heterogeneous and distributed data systems based on a distributed data repository. The position developed in this paper is that Master Data Management (MDM) will contribute to achieving this objective in a context marked by the dispersion and duplication of data and diversity of information systems.

A Feature Selection-Based Method for an Ontological Enrichment Process in Geographic Knowledge Modelling

Nowadays, geographic information becomes too complex and abundant, thus recent research projects have been undertaken to make it manageable and exploitable. Ontologies are considered as a valuable support for geographic information representation. Building geographic ontologies could be viewed as an enrichment process. Alignment of concepts coming from different ontologies is central to the enrichment process and deeply affects the quality of the resulting ontology. The alignment of ontologies is based on using similarity measures. In the literature, there are many models for ontology alignment that mainly differ with respect to the similarity measures they use and the way they are combined. Most of the alignment methods do not deal with the problem of correlation between similarity measures. In this chapter, we address this issue to better decide which similarity measures we should consider to better assess the true similarity between concepts. Our proposal consists of using feature selection methods, in order to select a reduced set of relevant similarity measures.

Prediction Changes for Nonstationary Multi-Temporal Satellite Images using HMM

Due to the growing advances in their temporal, spatial, and spectral resolutions, remotely sensed data continues to provide tools for a wide variety of environmental applications. This chapter presents the benefits and difficulties of Multi-Temporal Satellite Image (MTSI) for land use. Predicting land use changes using remote sensing is an area of interest that has been attracting increasing attention. Land use analysis from high temporal resolution remotely sensed images is important to promote better decisions for sustainable management land cover. The purpose of this book chapter is to review the background of using Hidden Markov Model (HMM) in land use change prediction, to discuss the difference on modeling using stationary as well as non-stationary data and to provide examples of both case studies (e.g. vegetation monitoring, urban growth).

Re-Territorialising Governance and the State

Attracted by the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), political actors across the world have adopted computer-based systems for use in government as a means of reforming inefficiencies in public administration. This book chapter critically examines the convergent use of the new digital technologies and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) within the reform of government administration, through the in-depth examination of a central case study focused around a collaboration between the government of the Indian state of Karnataka and the non-profit eGovernments Foundation, from 2002 to 2006; a partnership which sought to reform existing methods of property taxation via the establishment of an online platform-system across the municipalities of 56 towns and cities within the state. The research analyses prevailing actor behaviour and interactions, their impact on the interplay of local contingencies and external influences shaping project implementation, and the disjunctions in these relationships which inhibit the effective exploitation of ICTs within the given context.

3D InSAR Phase Unwrapping within the Compressive Sensing Framework

This chapter presents a new phase unwrapping algorithm for the 3D Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (3D InSAR) volumes. The proposed approach is based on the relationship between the gradient vectors of the observed wrapped phase and the true phase respectively, when the Itoh condition is satisfied. Since this relationship is violated by the residue pixels in the observed wrapped phase, a general problem formulation which takes into account the estimation error due to these residue values is proposed. This approach exploits the temporal inter correlation between the interferometric frames within a compressive sensing framework. The 3D discrete curvelet transform is used in order to ensure a suitable sparse representation of the phase volume. The performance of the proposed 3D phase unwrapping algorithm is tested on simulated and real SAR 3D datasets

Nature of Geographic Knowledge Bases

In many domains such as environmental and urban planning, experts need to make reasoning and propose solutions. However marketed GIS software products are limited to store, display geographic information together with additional tools such as in spatial analysis, but they do not offer users the real functionalities which are useful for territorial intelligence. This first step is to propose novel models to represent this kind of knowledge needing not only to integrate geographic aspects, but also be independent of data acquisition technologies (satellite images, laser, crowdsourcing, etc.) and able to be used in different languages. After the definitions of geographic ontologies (to organize geographic feature vocabulary) and gazetteers (to structure toponyms in various languages), various examples will be presented in order to extract geographic semantics. A special attention will be devoted to geographic rules.

Spatial and Spatiotemporal Data Types as a Foundation for Representing Space-Time Data in GIS

A data type comprises a set of homogeneous values together with a collection of operations defined on them. This chapter emphasizes the importance of crisp spatial data types, fuzzy spatial data types, and spatiotemporal data types for representing static, vague, and time-varying geometries in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). These data types provide a fundamental abstraction for modeling the geometric structure of crisp spatial, fuzzy spatial, and moving objects in space and time as well as their relationships, properties, and operations. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview and description of these data types and their operations that have been proposed in research and can be found in GIS, spatial databases, moving objects databases, and other spatial software tools. The use of data types, operations, and predicates will be illustrated by their embedding into query languages.

A Paradigm of Improving Land Information Management

The information on land is a basic resource at the economic, social, and industrial levels. Many approaches have been made to enhance integrating the geospatial technology, enable managing the geospatial features, and provide decision makers with capabilities for best land governance. The goal behind this chapter is to develop an approach dealing with a necessary paradigm of improving land information management. Such approach is made up of a series of the fundamental requirements and principles. The requirements encompass the fundamental geodetic network supporting spatial infrastructure, a series of large-scale maps, an integrated land administration system, and a basic conceptual core model for the land information system. The principles of the new paradigm will be discussed. To achieve such objective, the object oriented approach as an emerging methodology was followed to improve land administration and management.

Towards the Integration of Trajectory Information Sources for Semantic Conflicts Detection Purpose

The advance of remote sensors and positioning technologies is leading to the eruption of disparate mobility data. For a long while, location sensing devices became released. As a result, different structures of mobility data sources may reveal the details of instantaneous behaviors performed by mobile entities. Collected mobility information forms the need of behavior modeling to understanding behaviors from cognitive and analytics perspectives. Each designer may use a different formalism and representation by using either “conceptual modeling” or “ontology”. The phenomenon of adopting ontologies by organizations creates a new type of data called semantic data handled by semantic databases. The diversity of these formalisms highly increases the structural and semantic heterogeneities and consequently increases the complexity of integration tasks. In this chapter, authors propose a semantic and scalable approach that unifies formalisms and representations by the means of ontologies. This approach is supported by a case study.