Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS

This volume collects the papers presented at the European Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT '93) held on the island of Elba, Italy, inSeptember 1993. Spatial information theory includes disciplinary topics and interdisciplinary issues dealing with the conceptualization and formalization of large-scale (geographic) space. It contributes towards a consistent theoretical basis for Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Geographic information systems are widely used in administration,planning, and science in many different countries, and for a wide variety ofapplications. Research results which relevant for GIS are distributed between many disciplines and contacts between researchers have been limited. At the same time, the development of GIS has been hinderedby the lack of a sound theoretical base. This conference was intended to help remedies these problems.

Inhalt
A cognitive model for the process of multimodal, incremental route descriptions.- Cognitive maps, cognitive collages, and spatial mental models.- A logical framework for reasoning about space.- Maintaining qualitative spatial knowledge.- Qualitative triangulation for spatial reasoning.- Enhancing qualitative spatial reasoning Combining orientation and distance.- Map semantics.- Development of a cartographic language.- Spatial queries and data models.- Topological querying of multiple map layers.- Towards a conceptual data model for the analysis of spatio-temporal processes: the example of the search for optimal grazing strategies.- The cognitive structure of space: An analysis of temporal sequences.- Hierarchies of space and time.- The voronoi model and cultural space: applications to the social sciences and humanities.- Interaction with GIS attribute data based on categorical coverages.- The semantics of relations in 2D space using representative points: Spatial indexes.- Computing visibility maps on a digital terrain model.- Toward a theoretical framework for geographic entity types.- Land, space and spatial planning in three time regions.- Geographic and manipulable space in two Tamil linguistic systems.- Scale and multiple psychologies of space.- GIS and modeling prerequisites.- A map editing kernel implementation: application to multiple scale display.- Metaphors create theories for users.- Using a landscape metaphor to represent a corpus of documents.- From interface to interplace: the spatial environment as a medium for interaction.- A keystroke level analysis of manual map digitizing.- Critical issues in the evaluation of spatial autocorrelation.- A directional path distance model for raster distance mapping.- Symbolic spatial reasoning on object shapes forqualitative matching.- Reasoning about spatial structure in landscapes with Geographic Information Systems.