First Drafted 2006-01-04. Last Revised 2006-04-21. Version 1.2.15
Blog
This helps me organise information about what I do and may help others too.
MoSeS documentation...
OGC Grid Collision proposal has been sent. Thanks to all, especially Chris.
Steven, Hao and Chongyang are all asking similar things about the geomorphometrics assignemnt for geog5060.
I encouraged them to work together to save them some time.
OGC Grid Collision... It's getting there...
Read through the NCeSS Research Board minutes from 2006-03-13 that Katy sent today. All seems to be in order... I wonder what took so long distributing these.
One of our students Alex was wanting Surpop data but the service was broken. We emailed MIMAS helpdesk...
Level 1 Teaching and Personal Web Content has now been updated to DCMI and XHTML1.0-strict... Research next...
Chris's group have produced some metrics for an area up in Durham. They are thinking about identifying the channel and the flood plain and comparing with a flood risk map. Great!
Rodolfo got back about timings for the 50% Geomorphometrics coursework. I suggested to meet up and have a chat. There are many things that can be done. In meeting up we should find it easier to work out something of interest and something reasonable. It is difficult to judge peoples programming abilities and I am fairly new to the game of portioning work packages for which marks are to be awarded. Need to email Steve...
Erling popped in for a chat. He is interested in genography and had a good Easter in York learning about History. He thinks there is a gap in history from 500-700 AD. His web page is still rubbish! Alas, he said he is listening and may get at least the current details corrected...
google-sitemap_gen project home page
- The sitemap_gen.py script analyzes your web server and generates one or more Sitemap files. These files are XML listings of content you make available on your web server. The files can then be directly submitted to Google... Seems very useful...
google-ajaxslt project home page
- AJAXSLT is an implementation of XSL-T in JavaScript, intended for use in fat web pages, which are nowadays referred to as AJAX applications. Because XSL-T uses XPath, it is also an implementation of XPath that can be used independently of XSL-T... Should give it a try asap... Also check out how they are doing RSS, looks right to me!...
Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds
- This site describes a number of ways to encoding location in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds.
Responded to Belinda's email about [MoSeS] Population modelling information and meeting to explain model and think about how to visualise progress...
Responded to Rodolfos email about geomorphometrics 50% coursework project. Need to email Steve about this...
Registered an interest with Paul about
Who Really Runs Leeds?
Should be interesting. Here are some brief answers to the questions set out:
- Who really runs Leeds?
In terms of general day to day, week to week, year to year, people and their organisations run leeds e.g. bus drivers and transport, businessmen and businesses, criminals and crime etc...
- Who are the big players & power brokers?
It depends on the context... Power brokering can mean so many things. It depends on what type of power. If it's utilities its one thing, if its politics its another, if its law and order its different again, if its economic then it's again different. One thing that interests me is that some types of power are easier to control from outside Leeds than others per se... I'm more a proponet of the cock up theory than of any detailed conspiracy!
- Who makes the decisions?
Again this depends on the context. Decisions about land and land use involves a number of authorities and potentially complex economics etc... Decisions about utilities, transportation, infrastructure generally, operational control etc they are all different.
- Who sets the agendas for change & regeneration?
What agendas? I'm not sure there is sufficient organisation...
- What are the external influences & effects of businesses in Leeds?
Leeds affects and is effected greatly. I think you need a Semantic Web to answer this!
- What role do citizens play in all this?
The most important. Ultimately I think the people have power!
- Who are the winners & losers in the governance of Leeds?
Everyone, but most significantly the people that set foot in the city.
I'm interested about who comes, who expresses interest in this event. More than anything else, I'm interested in how the information is mapped.
We all really know that batman runs leeds!
Data Documentation Initiative
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/DDI/dtd/index.html
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/ddi-alliance/ddi/dtd/Version2-1.dtd
Meeting with Phil and Martin to explain MoSeS population modelling. This went well! We used the
whiteboard in my office and I did a lot of explaining. Phil took notes and will write these up
and send them. Phil and Martin feel a bit left out of the loop. They would like to see more
documentation and be more involved in generating population datsets. All of us understand that
Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science is much more than modelling the UK human population
as households, individuals and communal establishments for 2001 to 2031 and developing
health, business and transport applications based on this. However this particular aspect is of
key concern to Phil and Martin and they want to be convinced that the datasets being generated
are fit for purpose.
Updating personal part of my web content including this blog which moves to a new location...
Chased Andy Evans about OGC membership agreement...
Steven Pickering droped by to get an outline of the US mainland as some text file.
Nice to do a bit of GIS work... We talked and I learned some of what Steven is up to.
I encouraged him to set up a web home page to map out his virtual organisation and
information flows. I think he will. I'm going to email a URL to this entry to remind
him... Great Steven has emailed back and
Dr Steven Pickering's Home Page
is under active development :)
While Steven was here we emaied
David Meredith
as I wanted to know how to logon to the NGS portal... David got back to me and copied in
Xiao and Xiabo (I think these are guys that were at the NCeSS training school recently and
are who Rob Allan suggested I contact to develop our sakai portal... Great, I'll do a bit
of investigation and email back...
Chris is around... Need to develop GIS Grid Collision proposal...
Paul came by and set me up properly for using SRB on the testbed. We chatted about a few things and
showed each other some tricks on Web content development and delivery - standards and tools :)
I'm interested in
European Science Foundation (ESF)/ Inventing Europe: Technology and the Making of Europe, 1850 to the Present
. This interest is from an e-Infrastructure and e-framework perspective, in particular developments
since the advent of the World Wide Web. Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) is contributing to the
invention of Europe as an e-Research collaboration with a world-wide mission. If such a
collaborative contemporary information technology focus ties in with your interests - please let me
know, and maybe we can harness resources to organise a detailed response... I propose that the
centre of gravity or core area of such a response be 1. Building Europe through Infrastructures from
the following list:
-
1. Building Europe through Infrastructures: examines how Europe was shaped by transnational
infrastructures – the material links within and between nation states (and regions) including
canals, rivers, railroads, highways, energy, media, communication, and information networks.
-
Constructing European Ways of Knowing: examines the ways in which Europe became articulated
through efforts at bringing knowledge and practices together on a European scale. These efforts
range from informal networks to formal large-scale European projects.
-
Consuming Europe: explores how a range of social actors—including businesspeople, the state,
professionals, consumer groups and consumers—proposed, developed, and reworked material
artefacts for specific local, regional, and national contexts. At times these efforts defied
and at other times reinforced prevailing trends toward European markets, statist arrangements,
use patterns, and identities.
-
Europe in the Global World: explores the making of Europe through colonial, ex-colonial,
trans-Atlantic, and other global exchanges. By “provincialising” Europe, the non-teleological
nature of the processes studied will become clearer.
The deadline for outline proposals is 31 May 2006.
Once upon a time there was a MoSeS meeting when I shared a dream of the future where one day by
routine we could link individual census records and helath data by name and address and that
Grid Computing would allow it to be done safely and securely. I was informed this was a pipe
dream, or at least there was some scoffing and the words "... it'll never happen ... they'll
never allow it ... oh no no ... " began to ring...
On page 68 of
Ethnicity and health in Scotland: can we fill the information gap? A demonstration project
focusing on coronary heart disease and linkage of census and health records
is a diagram showing exaclty what can be done... It seems it has been done... I have not read
the report in detail yet, but I will give it some attention in the not too distant future... The
conclusions are certainly encouraging...
Read OGC Grid collision proposal... Done... Develop some additions and email thoughts...
GEMEDA
had a quick look and emailed Paul and Mark to spark off some emails. Paul was communicating with
Pascal last week. It seems GEMEDA is moving away from grid enabling CAS and focusing on SARs...
Had a skim of the
NCeSS Service Delivery Board Minutes from March
. The NCeSS website is to be revamped and a content management system (CMS) may be used.
Good, IMHO the website is very important and should be developed well and given suffient
resources. I want it to be standards compliant and like a portal, more ReDReSSlike. A
CMS is a good idea. I wonder what software will be used... lenya, plone, sakai, something
else... Mark has already asked me to be responsible for developing MoSeS content. This is
good as I can move it from it's current location...
SCIENCE CONSULTATION: Your help needed
Replied to research support to let them know:
IMHO the key is a full implementation of fully qualified Dublin Core and the development of Semantic Web
Content across the board to: understand our information flows and operations; enhance collaboration and
efficiency. Team work and respect at every level across administrative boundaries...
Really should push to get my own web content in order... Echoed this reponse to Kirsty Finn who is
working on a consultation exercise on the future needs for research into research methods and
methodology for NCRM (ESRC).
Bumped into
David Appleyard
and discussed his training and role as web content developer. It seems David needs to have a meeting with
Mike Crabtree
his line manager to detail a training and development plan. For some parts of David's work he can feed from
some of the research going on in the School of Geography, particularly MoSeS. IMHO David needs to be drawn
into a development cycle for updating the schools web content. A move to XML and in particular XHTML2.0 will
be of great benefit. I am fairly confident that this can be done without those viewing the current content
being aware of the underlying changes. This should prevent major disputes over the presentation style of
information content. I am learning a lot about how to develop the next generation standard web content and
would like to pass on what I have learned so that we all benefit... I'll email this entry to both Mike and
David now... It'll be up to David to chase this up... Done!
Mike Crabtree popped along with an update on the linux server he is setting up for MoSeS. Mike will need
to know the root password, but is giving MoSeS access to this level. Initially the server will allow connections
from machines within the University of Leeds. Routes through the firewall will be opened on an as needed basis.
Root will maintain an XML file detialing configuration on the base install. MoSeS will be responsible for backing
this up along with any content. 2.5G P4 1.5G RAM, very useful resource. Mike will let us know when it will be
ready - hopefully early next week. I will email the team now so they know what is going on... Done!
Trying to get postgres configured so as to run through Belinda's Toy Model code... Done... Got Belinda's code
running in NetBeans... Time to give Eclipse a run...
Great! Chris Higgins got back with a draft proposal on OGC Grid Collision. Need to read this in detail
and organise with Terry et al at NCeSS to provide second draft version to Chris by COB on 2006-04-13.
Some of this looks interesting and relevant. I see some of our NCeSS colleagues are in the programme:
Research Methods Festival Programme
. I quite fancy a trip to Oxford 17th-21st July and have emailed Belinda, Paul and Mark... Belinda
had planned to go anyway...
Had a quick look at
OSSIM
which is being integrated with uDIG for raster support...
Trying to get postgres configured so as to run through Belinda's Toy Model code... Done... Got Belinda's code
running in NetBeans... Time to give Eclipse a run... Wow, Eclipse is great! I'm converted... I wonder if I
will revert to NetBeans...
Great! Chris Higgins got back hopefully a draft proposal on OGC Grid Collision should be distributed before next
week. Must remember to keep everyone in the loop. Not sure about anyone other than Mark from the School of
Geography at Leeds. Awaiting some response from these folk...
Could do with linking information about white rose grid talk I gave last week...
Great, Vinny came along and installed postgres. Unfortunately Belinda's code did not work work first time.
Needed to get beanutils, but that was simple. Emailing Paul and Belinda to work out next step... Done...
Awaiting reply... Oh, discovered I was being over optimistic. Netbeans failed to notice the change in jars
and the lack of a class to extend until I modified my code... Oh well, I'm sure we can fix this soon...
Code... Getting there... Nearly seprerated communal establishment (CE) populations... Code is getting a bit messy though...
Many improvements can be made... Perhaps biggest improvement is to select only CE residents from ISAR to populate
CEs. This can possible be done from reltohr=-9. It best done with a newly ordered AGE0RELTOHRSAR... Great! I seem
to have ironed out the bugs and have the population creation program running in a way. There are several ways forward
from this point... Next I am to re-integrate the other optimisations... I think this is done... Having to revert to use
ToyModel version 0.1 though :(...
10:30-10:45 Impromptue meeting with Martin about population modelling... He will check his email about the meeting
next week.
Meeting Paul at 3:30... Another good meeting, we are learning a lot from each other I think...
It does seem like I should move to Eclipse from NetBeans sooner rather than later... We are a
little concerned that Belinda's MoSeS code platform currently relies on postgres. Why not Apache
Derby I wonder... Perhaps the easiest way is for me to get IT to install postgres on my machine
then dig into Belinda's java...
Meeting with Phil and any others, Martin etc that want to learn about the population
modelling and how the information about the process is disseminated... Scheduled for
10:30Am Wednesday 12th. (No network in East Building then!) I'll email belinda and let
her know its happening... Done!
Code...
Registered for
Spatially Embedded Complex Systems Engineering (SECSE)
Twiki account... Plan to set up collaboration to look at Geographically Weighted Statistics
and the network formation of relationships from the UK Human Population modelling from 2001 to
2031 as part of MoSeS.
Replied to Mark's workflow email attaching a GEON architecture description I scraped from the
GEON portal (it was presented at AllHands2005).
An important function of GEON seems to be to act as a data repository.
I wonder:
1) How does
Kepler
compare to
jBPM
?
Kepler and GEON Documentation seems fairly poor and I found little mention of standards which is worrying.
Despite this, the GEON portal may offer something we can build on, or an architecture we can use.
In NCeSS there is at least one expert on workflow (Edoardo Pignotti)
There are also portal experts (Tobias Shiebeck, Rob Allan, Rob Crouchley et al.).
I think we should try to use this expertise. To try to pull on this we should conduct our conversation on the NCeSS forum?
There might be added benefits of this, openning the discussion up even wider.
Code...
Belinda made a good MoSeS toy Model code release on BSCW. I need to get postres and hibernate
installed on my Pc to use it... having trouble with this... Paul offered to help me out
if I've not figured this out before tomorrow...
Excellent meeting with Paul about MoSeS. Great that he can now focus more energy on the project! We
covered so much ground in the meeting it is too much to blog now especially since I need to get on
with coding...
Chris Higgins communicated again about JISC OGC collision. All fairly confidential really, so not going
to throw notes up here yet. Chris will hopefully email Rob Proctor, Mark Birkin and myself later today.
Great, Cecilia got back to me. Hopefully her colleague will get back to me once she returns from holiday.
Raj Bhopal
has done some interesting work linking census and health data (using name and address data)?
Does this report that detial it?
Dived deep into XML again... There is so much to learn and so much application needed... Perhaps
work through some examples then go home...
Chatted with
Rob Lewis
from the Greater London Authority (GLA)
and
Cecilia MacIntyre
Head of Demography, General Register Office for Scotland
about NCeSS and MoSeS over lunch. Both are on the UPTAP Advisory Committee.
Rob is very keen for links to be made with regard dissemination beyond the academic community.
Cecilia talked metadata and fortunetly we both managed not to get indigestion or too worked up.
The quality of metdata in Social Science data and government is improving. However UK population
census metadata is in the pre XML pre DCMI dark ages. Interestingly Cecilia knows of a project that
used name and address information to link ethnicity from the census with a health database.
Fantastic! I want to know more. Justin Keen and the other MoSeS big wigs will be suprised, they did
not think such a thing could be done. I will email Cecilia now, I should caveate that the standard
of this page is 1999, not 2006...;) Wow, sending Cecilia an email was tricky... Now I understand
why she was worried about spam, they have clearly been having problems. Let's hope the webmaster
comes up trumps...
UPTAP is running late... But running well. Oli's presentation was fantastic. Virtual and not
interactive, but will hopefully initiate a lot of collaboration. For MoSeS we are particualrly
keen to set up collaboration with Oliver to develop a model of the UK population from 2001 to
2031. This is a brief entry to stimulate this. I will email Oli in due course...
After the presentation some guy looking at the southern part of the NE region was interested in
the relationships with housing build and demand. He reckoned that there was evidence showing
that the southern part of the NE region was relatively self-contained with regard commuting and
migration.
I made a point that to the audience that the MoSeS Node of NCeSS was developing a UK human
population model for 2001 to 2031 to showcase eScience tools for modelling and simulation. I
made the point that the remit of e-Social Science is much broader than simply looking at this.
I hope to organise further collaboration will Oli. To kick this off, I will email and link to
this entry.
Roona Simpson made a point that Living apart together is not captured in any of the data Oli
was planning to use. Some other guy reckoned the work of John Haskey was relevant in this. I
think Oli is moving in the right direction to help us understand more of the complexities of
things like extra household family relationships by looking within the household at individuals
relationships.
Release MoSeS code... Done. I'll email Paul and Belinda... Done... On to Oli's talk now then...
Went over to say pass on my farewells to Luke who is off to work in a library down south.
Popped into reception to check post and had a conversation with Jan about modelling and
carbon neutrality and information management. Jan is our receptionist that is using
software to track the whereabouts of School of Geography staff. She knows about my blog now.
Am I expecting too much of my colleagues to map their whereabouts, information and energy flows?
Probably... Ho hum, back to code release :)
Release of MoSeS code interupted by desire to go to Oliver Duke-Williams' talk at UPTAP...
I am chomping at the bit... Really want to get using the new webserver Mike is setting up for
developing our MoSeS portal. First things first, I need to cut a new release of MoSeS code for
Paul. After that I should get back to the nightmare that is modelling the UK human population
from 2001 to 2031 based initially on UK Population Census data... First I will deal with
communal establishments populations and data creation using the Individual SAR. Next I will
write the loaders for the Household SAR... We need to start handling the look up files for
Super Output Areas too... Ugh!
Kevin Porteous from Leeds University Catering and Conference Service knocked on my door looking
for David Appleyard and the Graphics Unit. He is wanting a map so for a Piano competition held at
leeds. We talked briefly about Google Earth and Google Maps.
Google Map View of LS2 9JT
I'll email Kevin who doesn't have a Web Home Page (poor Kevin). His email box is full! Ah well...
Hopefully he will get what he wants from the graphics unit and David will move us into 2006 with a
bang and start mapping using google or something similar...
UPTAP Conference at the School of Geography.
So very relevant to MoSeS... Lot's of collaboration to be had... Network network...
Unfortunately no information found online at present about the event!
UPTAP
Adding to the carbon neutrality debate...
Want a new version of this Blog that sends RSS feeds. Need an associated RDF document.
Want to start aggregating feeds... this could be tricky to do well... Let's start with
one thing aggregating into one place... Hmmm... Still need to shutdown this pc...
Geongrid
Looks like it's taking off.
Mark Birkin
pointed me to this for MoSeS reckoning it will be useful. I am awaiting authorization to be
a portal user...
2006-03-29
Let's look at the last NCeSS Service Deliver Board Minutes...
Seems there not available yet, but the preparatory material gives me a good idea as to what it
was all about.
Blimey, how time flies! It's not that I've been doing nothing (I've not being doing nothing),
I've just been sufferring from
a lack of organisation since returning from a weeks hoilday to Ireland. Ireland was a fantastic
break I was ready for it so I though, but my return to work was chaotic and I did not know what
to do first. This was as much a systems failure than anything else. More and more I find that
while I do not implement Dublin Core Metadata Institute recommendations the more work I have.
Eeek it could all grind to a halt!
So, I'm still trying to use this blog to drive my information management... Let me track back...
What have I done since my last entry:
-
2006-03-28
Introduction to e-Infrastructure: Enabling the research of the future
The workshop was good.
Mike Mineter went through a lot of important introductory stuff most of which I had seen
before. I'm sure it was a great help for others there that were just getting into e-Science.
I learned some useful background on Shibboleth. Our admin guys at Leeds University seem
quite advanced on the implementation of it. It should enable much greater collaboration
within academia especially for courses. Penn State and Leeds have set up a federation for
developing joint degree programmes. They have a token guinea pig student taking a module.
It was said that Swiss and some Scandinavian universities are well advanced in this area.
The DAME guys have been successful in getting yet more funds, so they can keep going for
time. This has to be a good thing :)
There were various hints that e-Science money is running out and that traditional
e-Scientists are looking for application areas outside the harder sciences. I think this
is a good thing...
Sorry I felt a little uncomfortable giving my presentation. It was partly the place being a
little tight - not much room to wave arms and move around the screen. I was nervous, there
were a number of important people there and I didn't manage to relax during my presentation
and get into the swing of things. I don't think I presented well, but the practice should
help me do better next time...
It was hard to describe all of NCeSS, outline the future of e-Infrastructure for e-Social
Science and go into any detail of Modelling and Simulation in 20 minutes. I refered to the
notes that accompany the slides in the powerpoint presentation I prepared. I wanted the
audience to be checking out the URLs and feeding back...
I got on dodgy ground at one stage while I was covering a grey area regarding data (there are
many of them). I don't recall my exact words, but I bolted upright in bed last night... I
said something along the lines of: "sometimes it is best not to relax and not worry too much
about usage/license agreements". I was trying to make several points, but this was a bit of a
foot in mouth thing to say and I got a bit befuddled. I didn't mean it, it just came out
wrong. It was not an attempt at a joke or anything, I was thinking out loud. No excuse...
shoot me at dawn!
Social science metadata for discovery is usually not available, most of the data is old and
non-standard and for the most part non-XML. Making data securely available on the NGS
requires something like shibboleth and encryption/decryption. For much social science data
you are not to disclose some patterns you identify. The data and usage aggreements are
complex, so it is often that the data providers want to see your outputs before allowing
publication. This is an issue when there are a number of data providers involved. I'm not
planning on worrying about what I said too much. I haven't done anything really bad I hope,
but I feel like what I said could be interpreted that I was encouraging something I shouldn't...
Can I offer a similar defence to Robert:
"I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you
realise that what you heard is not what I meant..." Robert McCloskey, US State Department
Spokesman. On the back cover of Eats Shites and Leaves: Crap English and how to use it
A. Parody ISBN 1-84317-098-1
I'm not going to loose any more sleep on it hopefully. I'll try to back up by putting more
explanation on-line if you want...
Thanks to everyone involved. I look forward to our on-going collaboration.
-
-
NCeSS Node meeting
-
WUN GIS seminar
2006-03-03
I realise my blog has been way to formal (boring and not really conversational). Also it
has not been nearly colourful enough or contained nearly enough interesting material.
I've just checked out
Jody Garnett's Blog
. He is a bit of a hero that develops cool stuff and keeps us informed about all sorts of
goings on in open geospatial stuff. So, Jody pointed us to this
OGC Web Services Demo
. I'd like to iterate that if you have 15 minutes spare this is well worth consuming.
I think I'm going to drop standard English as it's too long winded...
Time to figure out RSS. Should probably use software once figured out how works.
How to test if works...
2006-02-24
Post Graduate Study Assistants Meeting With Victoria Robinson and Diane Collett
2006-02-23
ASAP Research Cluster Meeting
Nanlin Jin RELU Interview
2006-02-20
Post Graduate Study Assistants Meeting With Victoria Robinson
2006-02-08
ASAP Cluster meeting
2006-02-01 to 2006-02-02
4th NERC Grid GIS Working Group
- Good meeting. NeSC is a good place to meet! Make sure you address your actions and claim expenses!
2006-01-30
Reading
In preperation for the next MASS meeting I read
Pontius R.G. (Jr), Huffaker D., Denman K. (2004)
Useful techniques of validation for spatially explicit land-change models.
Ecological Modelling, Volume 179, Issue 4, Pages 445-461.
Section 1.2 Paragraph 5:
Useful definition of noise and over training/calibrating a model based on a sample.
Section 1.3 Paragraph 2:
"...it is helpful to use a validation technique that:
(a) budgets the sources of error,
(b) compares the model to a Null model,
(c) compares the model to a Random model,
(d) performs the analysis at multiple scales."
and
"It is important to compare the model to both a Null model and a Random model in order
to assess the additional predictive power, if any, that the model provides. Scale is
important to consider during any comparison of maps, because results can be sensitive
to scale and certain patterns may be evident at only certain scales (Kok et al., 2001
and Quattrochi and Goodchild, 1997)."
Section 2.2:
The neural network modelling of
MEDALUS III
, and
MedAction
relates to this. In predicting the quantity of land types, the models were calibrated
on the baseline (existing data) and then a prediction was made using the same cut-off
and neural network parameters. However, for the population modelling a linear
interpolation of NIDI's forecasts was used to constrain the results. A model that
predicts the locations of something implicitly predicting the number of locations
or amount of that thing.
Section 2.5:
Considering scale issues is good. The details of aggregation in the paper does not
mention the many different aggregations that can result.
The different aggregations of this type are illustrated in Figure 1 of
Turner (2000)
. It would be less biased to consider all possible aggregations and at each level of
aggregation. Some average could then be used. However, aggregating in this way is
inherently biased due to the unsymmetrical nature of squares. What is less biased in
principle is drawing values into a statistic based on circular regions. Doing this
brings up questions of whether distance weighting should be applied. Usually some
kind of distance weighting is desirable and often it is a monotonic function
with further away values being weighted less. More complex non-monotonic weighting
can be applied by subtracting some such weighting. It is the distance weightings that
ramp up monotonically to some maximum and then back down again monotonically that
focus on a particular scale. Such weightings are useful for studying distributions
of plant species and human settlement. In the case of comparing if two surfaces of
distribution are similar various Geographically Weighted Statistics (GWS) may be of
interest.
Turner (2006)
provides more details on raster based GWS.
Section 2.6:
"The Null Resolution is the resolution at which the accuracy of the predictive model
matches the accuracy of the Null model."
Section 4.3: The bias of masking
"Whatever the statistical criterion, it is dangerous to mask out parts of the study
area during the validation phase. Results of statistical analysis can be extremely
sensitive to any procedure that ignores parts of the study area."
This is why I deceided against masking non-road areas in PhD studies of the distribution
of Road Accidents.
References
Kok K., Farrow A., Veldkamp T.A. and Verberg, P., 2001. A method and application of multi-scale validation in spatial land use models. Agr. Ecosyst. Environ. 85 1-3, pp. 223-238.
Quattrochi D.A., Goodchild M.F., (Eds.), 1997. Scale in Remote Sensing and GIS. Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton, FL.
Turner A.G.D. (2006) Raster Based Geographically Weighted Statistics for Studying the
Spatial Change of Incidence Distributions Over Time: An Application to Stats 19 Personal
Injury Road Accident Data, PhD Working Paper.
Turner A.G.D. (2000) Density Data Generation for Spatial Data Mining Applications.
Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on GeoComputation, England, September.
2006-01-11
Browsed
JASSS Volume 8, Issue 4 October, 2005
- Lots here to come back to!
Attended the
Biosystems Reading Group
- Discussion based on the following papers:
- How can simulation using Agent Based Models be made more scientific?
Attended the
Ecology and Global Change Research Cluster
meeting. A seminar given by
Richard Law
on Spatial Patterns and Inferences about Dynamics in Plant Communities
- Illustrated an example of torus type distance weighting being useful. Interesting
notions of pair and multiple densities. Often it is interesting when things appear
in two's! Illustrated the Janzen-Connell hypothesis as described in
Hyatt l.A., Rosenberg M.S., Howard T.G., Bole G., Fang W., Anastasia J., Brown K.,
Grella R., Hinman K., Kurdziel J.P. Gurevitch J., (2003) The distance dependence
prediction of the Janzen-Connell hypothesis: a meta-analysis. OIKOS 103: 590-602.
Described the use of inhomogenous K-function (as described
here
and
here
) for work on cancer epidemiology by
Diggle P.J.
and colleagues.
- All the talk of kernels, scales and distance was refreshing. To encourage further
collaboration I emailed Richard and pointed him to work on
GAM/K
2006-01-06
Read
Reitsma F., Albrecht J. (2005) Implementing a new data model for simulating process.
International Journal of Geographical Informaiton Science Vol. 19, No. 10, November,
pages 1073-1090.
- Focuses on storing system state at each time step of a dynamic model. The method is
prototyped with a watershed runoff simulation.
Emailed the reference to
The Multi Agent Systems and Simulation Research Interest Group
and
Brian Irvine
.
Read
Rushton G. (2004) Book Review of Spatial Epidemiology: Methods and Applications (2001)
Edited by P. Elliot, J. Wakefield, N. Best, and D. Briggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
ISBN 0-19-851532-4.
International Journal of Geographical Informaiton Science Vol. 18, No. 6, September,
pages 627-629.
.
- Elaboration the need for provenance data without actually calling it that. This is a
useful reference for MoSeS work.
2006-01-05
Read
Albani M., Klinkenberg B., Andison D.W., Kimmins J.P. (2004) The choice of window size
in approximating topographic surfaces from Digital Elevation Models.
International Journal of Geographical Informaiton Science Vol. 18, No. 6, September,
pages 577-593.
DOI: 10.1080/13658810410001701987
- "Presents a general analytical method to estimate the propagation of elevation errors to
the principal derived topographic variables (slope, aspect and surface curvatures) as
calculated with the quadratic approximation method with variable evaluation window size of
Wood (1996). It expands the work of Florinsky (1998b) to incorporate evaluation windows of
sizes larger than 3x3, and considers spatially correlated elevation error." (Taken form
the conclusion)
Like the paper a lot! It has an excellent conclusion and is well referenced. Much of
the referenced work should be looked at for GEOG5060 and Geomorphometrics work. Paper
should be on the reading list for the GEOG5060 students. As should:
Wood, J. D. (1996) The geomorphological characterisation of Digital Elevation Models.
PhD thesis, University of Leicester.
Read
Shortridge A.M. (2004) Geometric variability of raster cell class assignment. In
International Journal of Geographical Information Science Vol. 18, No. 6, September,
pages 539-558.
DOI: 10.1080/13658810410001702012
- Reports a set of experiments concerning square celled rasterisation of vector data and
variability of changing cell resolution and origin. The focus is on classified area data.
I liked this paper! The rasterisations being considered were square celled, but the
paper did not discuss rasters with a triangular/hexagonal cell structure. In relation to
this, there was no discussion of rotational variance and the alignment of the cells on
axes. It was especially pleasing to see the work of
Steve Carver
and
Chris Brunsden
referenced.
Browsed
The CeLSIUS Website
- That of the support team for academic users of the Office for National Statistics'
Longitudinal Study
The LS is something we are looking to use for MoSeS.
Read
Rogerson, P. A. (2001) Monitoring point patterns for the development of space-time clusters. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (A), 164, pp. 87 - 96.
- Adaption of cumulative sum methods for use with Knox's space-time statistic and application
to Burkitt's lymphoma in Uganda. Contains a useful description and equations for a local
version of the Knox test for space-time interactions. From the description this method is
similar to that of GAMK-T of
Stan Openshaw
et al
, which should have been referenced.
It may be worth contacting the author and using this method in your PhD.
