Place-Based GIS: The Next Frontier of GIScience Research

Presenter: Song Gao

Advisory Committee: Krzysztof Janowicz, Michael F. Goodchild,

and Helen Couclelis

Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara

Email： sgao@geog.ucsb.edu

• Coordinates

• Distance

• Direction

• Projection

• Topology

• Scale

• Placename

• Description

• Experience

• Affordance

• Culture

• Semantics

Space and Place

PBGIS ?

Research Questions

• What are the distinctions between place and space

in GIS?

• When and where do we need PBGIS?

• What should be the basic elements of PBGIS?

• How to develop platial theories, models and

techniques analogous to their spatial counterparts?

Where is UC Santa Barbara ?

• Spatial Approach -- Geometry

• Point: (lat 34.41254, long -119.84813)

• Polygon: a region

Where is UC Santa Barbara ?

• Platial Approach – Narrative

• UCSB is one part of UC system. The main

campus is located on a 1,022-acre site near Isla

Vista and Goleta, California, United States,

approximately 8 miles from Downtown Santa

Barbara and 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

Spatial Hierarchy (Distance)

Platial Hierarchy (Partof)

Paris is partOf Île-de-France Marne-la-Vallée is partOf Île-de-France

Disneyland Paris is part of Paris in human minds but is not contained in the Paris municipality

A place hierarchy does not necessarily require

spatial containment

Sense of Place

• Cognitively defined

• Hierarchically organized

• Semantically interlinked

Data • Place Names in Gazetteers (ADL Gazetteer at

UCSB)

• Natural Language Descriptions about Place

• Social Media

• Linked Data Cloud

Question: What data structures are better to present, store,

and manage the platial data?

System

Functionality

Spatial Join or Platial Join

Platial JOIN

• Attach the attributes/properties or characteristics from the

join entities to the target place using semantics.

• In other words, the Platial Join operation involves the

aggregation of properties (attributes) from one or multiple

place entities S to the target place entity T based on merge

rules and their predicates P, including the“part-whole”

relation, the “locatedAt” relation, or other spatial relationships

e.g., touch, overlap, equals, contains, inside, and intersects.

Song Gao, Krzysztof Janowicz, Grant McKenzie, Linna Li. Towards Platial Joins and Buffers

in Place-Based GIS. In ACM SIGSPATIAL COMP'13, Nov. 5, 2013, Orlando, FL, USA.

Platial JOIN

• Cities & Towns

• Counties in California

Spatial Buffer or Platial Buffer

• Neighboring places

Platial Buffer

• There are two understandings of platial buffers:

(1) One method still applies the Euclidean-distance buffer

on place, which must consider cognitive context due to the

uncertainty of qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR) about

distances and directions referring to places.

(2) An alternative way to process it, is based on the

topological distance (connectivity or hierarchy) and

semantic relations between places.

Song Gao, Krzysztof Janowicz, Grant McKenzie, Linna Li. Towards Platial Joins and Buffers

in Place-Based GIS. In ACM SIGSPATIAL COMP'13, Nov. 5, 2013, Orlando, FL, USA.

Platial Configuration

Platial Buffer on DBpedia Subway Systems

Schematic Maps

Wrap up

• Space v.s. Place in GIScience

• PBGIS in different contexts

• Platial Join and Buffer

• Formalize the platial functionality

Reference:

Song Gao, Krzysztof Janowicz, Grant McKenzie, Linna Li. Towards Platial

Joins and Buffers in Place-Based GIS. In ACM SIGSPATIAL COMP'13, Nov.

5, 2013, Orlando, FL, USA.

Questions & Comments ?

Thanks for your attention!

Email: sgao@geog.ucsb.edu

Website: www.geog.ucsb.edu/~sgao/