The Gaea system is a spatio-temporal database management system under development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Gaea is intended to provide advanced data management and analysis to geographical information systems (GIS) for global change studies. We present the objectives and long-term vision of the Gaea project, describe the Gaea system architecture and discuss the current state of devel...

MACHINE–GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS) FOR LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES:

Information given in topographic map captions or in GIS models is often insufficient to recognize interesting geographical patterns. Some prototypes of GIS have already been extended with a knowledge-base and some reasoning capabilities to support sophisticated map interpretation processes. Nevertheless, the acquisition of the necessary knowledge is still a demanding task for which machine lear...

A geographical information system (GIS) is proposed as a suitable tool for mapping the spatial distribution of forest ® re danger. Using a region severely a ected by forest ® res in Central Spain as the study area, topography, meteorological data, fuel models andhuman-caused riskweremappedand incorporated within a GIS. Three danger maps were generated: probability of ignition, fuel hazard and h...

Geographical Bioinformatics Systems (GBS) represent the marriage between two distinct and well established fields, GIS & Bioinformatics. Bioinformatics refer to the use of computers to handle biological information—that is, the use computers to store, compare, retrieve, analyze and predict the composition or structure of biomolecules. On the other hand, the term Geographic Information Systems (...

Water quality models have reached a high degree of sophistication, but their weak side remains user interface and output georeferencing. The aim of this paper is to propose an interfacing procedure between two widespread but specialised programming environments: ArcVIEW as a Geographical Information System (GIS) and Matlab as a scientific programming tool for numerical analysis. The proposed so...

Geographical information systems (GIS) are designed to handle large amounts of information about the natural and built environments. Any such large collection of observational information is prone to uncertainty in a number of forms. If that uncertainty is ignored there may be anything from slightly incorrect predictions or advice, to analyses that are completely logical, but fatally flawed. In...

One of the fundamental issues of geographical information science is to design GIS interfaces and functionalities in a way that is easy to understand, teach, and use. Unfortunately, current geographical information systems (including ArcGIS) remains very difficult to use as spatial analysis tools, because they organize and expose functionalities according to GIS data structures and processing a...