Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
While very traditional applications such as map production and cadastral data management remain major players as consumers of GIS technology, the last decades have seen an impressive uprising of new application domains for spatial data, as well as an increasing attention into spatio-temporal, rather than only spatial, phenomena. The demand is high in particular for decision support applications based on factual geographical data. Indeed, decision-makers today face an extremely complex reality where so many different factors interrelate so many facets of the problem under consideration that the support of a computer system becomes unavoidable. Among the influential factors and facets the distribution of relevant phenomena in space and time very frequently plays a major role. The elaboration of long-term policies regarding land, population, and resource management, analysis of environmental issues, fauna, flora, and natural hazards monitoring, a controlled development of cities, road networks, facilities management, and industrial zones, all of these are outstanding examples where complex issues have to be analyzed on the basis of accurate knowledge on past events characterizing the geographical area for which a decision has to be taken. This need for pervasive GIS technology has already prompted a significant change in the software systems that are being offered on the marketplace. Users can now move away from the old-fashioned technology that dominated the market and turn towards more upto-date desktop systems for a simpler and more flexible support of their applications. One of the side effects of such a technology shift is that the prominent profile of GIS users is rapidly changing. While old-fashioned systems called for computer specialists to become tractable, desktop GIS are intended to serve the application-oriented, not to say the casual users, e.g., geographers, economists, and all sort of managers with little or no familiarity with the idiosyncrasies of computer systems. The immediate consequence is that the development of friendlier and simpler human-computer interfaces supporting applicationoriented interactions has become an essential challenge for providers of GIS services. To reach this goal, GIS technology still needs to achieve a substantial progress in terms of interaction modes between users and the system, which includes in particular the data modeling features interfaces are built on. Current user interfaces are mostly based on the form-filling paradigm. While this approach is very simple for users, it implies that only pre-planned interactions (data acquisition, queries, and updates) are possible. Such a fixed pattern for data usage is well suited for the development of applications, where these have |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2001 | 10.1023/A:1011403703806 | GeoInformatica |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
spatio-temporal data models,resource manager,data acquisition,data management,decision support,facility management,software systems,decision maker,natural hazard,side effect,spatial data,data model,user interface,human computer interface | Data science,Data mining,Temporal data models,Computer science | Journal |
Volume | Issue | ISSN |
5 | 1 | 1573-7624 |
Citations | PageRank | References |
5 | 0.67 | 0 |
Authors | ||
1 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stefano Spaccapietra | 1 | 2603 | 565.28 |