GIS is a tool for the production of applied geographic knowledge as well as for its wide dissemination and use. This paper examines the problems of quality control and monitoring resulting from the ease with which non-experts can now produce, using GIS, many kinds of documents thus far obtainable only from experts. Because the quality of a GIS product is largely a function of the background ass...

Distributed physical models for the space-time distribution of water, energy, vegetation, and mass flow require new strategies for data representation, model domain decomposition, a-priori parameterization, and visualization. The Geographic Information System (GIS) has been traditionally used to accomplish these data management functionalities in hydrologic applications. However, the interactio...

Recently, the need of the geologic information has been rising in many fields such as environmental geology, disaster mitigation, and urban geological applications. For these fields, it is effective to provide geologic information as a three dimensional(3-D) model that can be generated and visualized in general purpose GIS software. The present work aims at introducing a basic theory, implement...

Developing a three-dimensional (3D) data model for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is an essential and complex issue. 3D modelling in GIS is becoming ever more important for the development of cyber cities and digital earth, which have recently become feasible. A competent 3D model forms an efficient foundation for 3D visualization, query and spatial analysis. As a development of the exist...

In physics, objects can be divided into rigid and soft objects according to the object deformation capacity. Similarly, geo-object can also be classified into rigid geo-objects (e.g., building, urban) and soft geo-objects (e.g., mudflow, water, soil erosion). There are three types of approaches for 3D GIS modeling, i.e., surface-based, volume-based, and hybrids in terms of geometry. These appro...

GIS assist in specific planning and decision-making processes in irrigation through the input, spatial analysis and output of relevant information. The real strength of GIS is its ability to integrate information. This integration power makes the scope of GIS almost infinite. The unique integration capability of GIS allows disparate data sets to be brought together to create a complete picture ...

This article will present the reader with questions concerning data integration, numerical modeling and visualization, in general and in particular related to a environment simulation project. It will also present the reader with a new way of using GIS, called "visual inspection". When dealing with data from diverse sources, one needs to ask: "To what extent are GIS able to integrate diierent d...

Many climate models predict that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions may cause a threshold response of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC). These model predictions are, however, uncertain. Reducing this uncertainty can have an economic value, because it would allow for the design of more efficient risk management strategies. Early information about the MOC sensitivity...

Mapping of landslides, quickly providing information about the extent of the affected area and type and grade of damage, is crucial to enable fast crisis response, i.e., to support rescue and humanitarian operations. Most synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data-based landslide detection approaches reported in the literature use change detection techniques, requiring very high resolution (VHR) SAR i...

The Proportional Hazards (PH) model is an important type of failure time regression model which relates the occurrence probability of critical failures to influential factors. However, little research work has been done on detecting changes in the PH models fitted based on different sets of reliability data. This paper develops the methods for change detection in the Cox PH models, also known a...