Lewis Oaten

A Brief History of GIS

2010-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

Clarke (1986) defines GISs as “computer assisted systems for the capture, storage, retrieval, analysis and display of spatial data.” Several similar definitions exist, but it has been noted by Cowen (1988) that the use of such vague definitions are a disservice to the field. He goes on to describe four more precise approaches for defining GISs:

The Process-Oriented Approach originates from an article by Calkins and Tomlinson (1977) and describes a GIS as a process for the input, storage, retrieval, analysis, and output of geographic information. This description holds the closest similarity to that of .

The Application Approach defines GISs in terms of their purpose. Pavlidis (1982) provides several suggested categories for this, such as: natural resource inventory systems, urban systems, planning and evaluation systems, management command and control systems, and citizen scientific systems.

The Toolbox Approach views GISs as a collections of tools, functions and algorithms which are used to convert raw data into the output required by the user. By this definition a GIS is not complete without the full range of features fitting the whole process of input, output and analysis. Tomlinson and Boyle (1981) provides an earlier delineation of the functions required by a GIS.

The Database Approach is a variant of the toolbox approach which was originally described by Goodchild (1985) as “a system which uses a spatial database to provide answers to queries of a geographical nature.” This definition encompasses spatial databases as GISs in their own right.

These definitions vary significantly between authors and it is the case that, depending on the context, many systems related to geospatial information could be considered GISs. In this report, a GIS will be viewed from the process-orientated approach as the collaborative geospatial environment will serve as a system to support the process of manipulating raw data into a user-presentable view.

One reason for the existence of so many vague definitions for GISs is that it is a young technology which is deeply rooted in a well established science. The science of cartography goes back centuries and was aimed at plotting topography, the lie of the land and transportation features (Clarke, 2001). As early as 1912 thematic cartography had documented use. One of the first examples being the mapping of the city extent of Düsseldorf at several time periods (Steinitz et al., 1976). Following this, overlays began to be used more heavily. An example of this is by MIT researchers who calculated the desirability of highways. They achieved this by using overlaid maps in several combinations depending on their weighting (Clarke, 2001).

Following this initial research many years of rapid evolution occurred. Geospatial researchers grasped every opportunity to develop the processes and systems in line with the evolution of computing. The arrival of modular computer programming languages and personal computers provided a more accessible platform on which research could be performed and so added momentum to the progress being made (Clarke, 2001). More recently with the abundant interconnectivity through networking, there has been a shift towards the development of collaborative tools.

This shift in direction can be attributed to the widespread emergence of the Internet and the growth in international corporations. It involved a thrust towards research and development in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). This technology is required to assist with work done outside of “same-place, same-time,” within space-time typology (Grudin, 1994). Geospatial research followed suit by studying synchronous and asynchronous collaboration activities (Braun and Guertin, 1997, Sarjakoski, 1998, Carver et al., 1998), perspectives and negotiation (Boland and Tenkasi, 1995, Harvey, 1997), representing participants and facilitating joint behaviour (Ferrand, 1996) and the usability of tools and environments (Jankowski and Stasik, 1997, Brkljac and Counsell, 1999).

References

R. J. J. Boland and R. V. Tenkasi. Perspective making and perspective taking in communities of knowing. Organization Science, 6(4):350–372, 1995.

P. Braun and D. P. Guertin. Public Access to Spatial Data: Neighborhood Association Information Needs in Tucson, Arizona. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual ESRI User Conference, Palm Springs, CA, July 1997. URL http://www.esri.com/library/userconf/proc97/proc97/to350/pap302/p302.htm .

N. Brkljac and J. Counsell. Usability of associated gis and vrml urban models. In Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Information Visualisation, page 550, Washington, DC, USA, 1999. IEEE Computer Society. ISBN 0-7695- 0210-5.

H. W. Calkins and Roger F Tomlinson. Geographic information systems: methods and equipment for land use planning. International Geographic Union Commission on Geographical Data Sensing and Processing. Resource and Land Investigations (RALI) Program, Virginia, 1977.

S. Carver, R. Kingston, and I. Turton. Accessing gis over the web: An aid to public participation in environmental decision-making. In GISRUK ’98, volume 98, pages 98–3, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1998. URL http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/vdmisp/publications/paper1.html .

Keith C. Clarke. Advances in geographic information systems. Computers, environment and urban systems, 10(3-4):175–184, 1986.

Keith C. Clarke. Getting started with geographic information systems. Prentice Hall Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2 edition, 2001. ISBN 0139238891 9780139238895.

David J. Cowen. GIS versus CAD versus DBMS: What are the differences? Photogramm. Eng. Remote Sens., 54(11):1551–1555, 1988.

N. Ferrand. Modelling and supporting multi-actor spatial planning using multiagents systems. In Proceedings of the Third NCGIA Conference on Integrating GIS and Environmental Modelling, pages 21–25, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, January 1996. URL http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/conf/SANTA_FE_CD-ROM/sf_papers/ferrand_nils/santafe.html .

M. F. Goodchild. Geographic information systems in undergraduate geography: A contemporary dilemma. The Operational Geographer, 8(1):34–38, 1985.

Jonathan Grudin. Computer-supported cooperative work: history and focus. Computer, 27(5):19–26, 1994. doi: 10.1109/2.291294. URL http://dx.doi.org/10. 1109/2.291294.

Francis Harvey. Improving multi-purpose GIS design: Participative design. In COSIT ’97: Proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Information Theory, pages 313–328, London, UK, 1997. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 3-540-63623-4.

P. Jankowski and M. Stasik. Design considerations for space and time distributed collaborative spatial decision making. Journal of Geographic Information and Decision Analysis, 1:1–8, 1997.

M. G. Pavlidis. Database management for geographic information systems. In Proc. National Conference on Energy Resource Management, volume 1, pages 255–260, 1982.

T. Sarjakoski. Networked gis for public participation–emphasis on utilizing image data. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 22(4):381– 392, 1998. ISSN 0198-9715. doi: DOI:10.1016/S0198-9715(98)00031-3. URL http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V9K-3X6JG78-6/2/2f647d508ac9d1c0d4e7bc3cc4eeb67b .

C. Steinitz, P. Parker, and L. Jordan. Hand drawn overlays: their history and prospective uses. Landscape Architecture, 66(5):444–455, 1976.

Roger F Tomlinson and A Raymond Boyle. The state of development of systems for handling natural resources inventory data. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 18(4):65–95, October 1981. ISSN 0317-7173 1911-9925. doi: 10.3138/7262-N455-7101-5347. URL http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/7262n45571015347 .

Caffeine Boost on a Hot Day

2010-04-09T00:00:00-07:00

The time has come to knuckle down and finish off my final year report and any straggling projects as well as start revision, it is also that time of year where summer is looming around the corner. We are just starting to get a few snippets of hot weather and so it’s nice to enjoy a cold drink. Considering that, as a software engineer, my caffeine level is directly proportionate to my productivity, I decided to take inspiration from an Australian couple who I met during my last weekend holiday.

From Iced Coffee

Ingredients

Instant coffee (1 – 3 tsp) or espresso (2 – 3 shots)
Sugar (same quantity as coffee)
Coca (if you want a Mocha)
Mug
Boiling water
Ice

Instructions

Insert your sugar into the mug.

Optionally add Coca to make an Iced Mocha.

Add coffee granules or espresso shots.

If you are using instant coffee then add a tiny amount of hot water. Either way, mix up all of the ingredients.

If you find that the granules don’t mix well, then a short blast in the microwave tends to dissolve everything.

Add Ice.

Mix up well to rapidly cool the hot drink.

Check that the drink is ice cold before continuing.

Add milk.

Optionally top-up with water.

Enjoy your iced coffee or iced mocha.

FOSS GIS Stack Demonstration

2010-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

Last week I completed the first two-week sprint of my final year project. The primary aim for the sprint was setting up a digital representation of terrain with embedded objects. This involved building the selection of FOSS which I had identified in a previous research sub-project. The output of this sprint is an experimentation server containing this software setup and the knowledge of how to build the software and rectify problems which occur. As this is not a tangible deliverable, I produced a demonstration that can be presented to the stakeholders.

The demonstration includes the high-level system design of the software stack and several screencasts demonstrating functionality. I compiled the video using Prezi.com and it can be viewed on YouTube here.

The progress of this sprint can be seen on the Scrumy sprint history. Future sprints will have tangible software deliverables and will be published on the GitHub project page.

An Investigation Into The Reasons Why Some Software Projects Fail

2010-01-21T00:00:00-08:00

In December 2009, as an element of my university course work, I submitted an essay entitled, “The relationship between requirements & design and the failure of software development projects”. It was graded as first-class and was placed top of the cohort. It provides a valuable overview as to why correct requirements’ elicitation at the outset, as well as subsequent analysis, is so critical to a software project’s success.

This report looks at the relationship between requirements and design, and the failure of software projects. It investigates several key areas of requirements and design which often lead to failure, such as requirements analysis, prototyping, working with stakeholders, change control and software tools. Each area is subject to critical analysis whereby the strengths and weaknesses of typical processes are identified, and suggestions for their improvements are documented. A case study is included which supports the report by documenting the catastrophic failure of the Mars Orbiter programme.

View the full report.

Mobile Data Preservation

2010-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

I have recently upgraded my phone from a Windows Mobile 6.1 to an Android 2.1 device. As with any OS upgrade, whether its on a computer or mobile phone, preserving your data is always a problem.

Most of my data is stored in “the cloud” as follows:
Google Calendar Sync for events, contacts and email,
Remember The Milk’s “MilkSync” for tasks,
“Shozu” and “PicasaWeb” for pictures
“Evernote” for notes.

So the only data left to be preserved were my SMS messages; with no obvious solution.

After some searching, I discovered this helpful article by Mario Mlynek. The article describes using PIMBackup, which can extract a variety of data from the Windows Mobile phone into a proprietary file format, and SMS Backup & Restore to transfer the data.

Unfortunately, it was not as simple as passing the data directly from one application to the other. The user is required to perform a transformation of the CSV-esque data into XML. To perform this transformation, any multi-line messages has to be changed to a single line with HTML break tags. The file must then be put through a Perl script, which Mario had developed. At this stage, I had to perform some minor modifications to get it to work. My version of the script can be downloaded here.

Finally, you place the sms.xml file onto the Android phone, via Bluetooth or an alternate browser as the default browser fails to recognise the file type. The messages can then be restored so that the dates, content and threading is as though the messages were originally sent to the Android phone. If you want to ensure that none of the new messages are pruned, you should remember to modify Android’s messaging application so that it doesn’t delete old messages before performing the restoration.

However, a problem arose once my 11,500 messages were restored – The Android messaging application doesn’t handle long messages threads particularly well. With one particular person, there were over 4,000 messages! This made me realise the benefit in pruning messages, however, I didn’t want to lose all of the valuable information that I had restored.

After a little searching around, I found a SMS backup solution called SMS Backup. This solution automatically transfers all your messages to Gmail using IMAP. It can mark the messages as read and store them with a particular label. As a result, you are able to view and search all or your archived messages, either through Gmail’s web interface, or on the Gmail Android application. Once the initial backup was performed (200 messages at a time), I was able to re-enable SMS pruning. As a result I had a faster phone and the knowledge that another area of my personal data is archived, secured and searchable.