Roughness is probably the most salient dimension pertaining to the perception of textures by touch and has been widely investigated. There is a controversy on how roughness relates to the texture’s spatial period and which factors influence this relation. Here, roughness during bare finger exploration of coarse textures is studied for different types of textures with elements of low height (0.3...

Typically, autonomous robot navigation relies on a detailed, accurate map. The associated representations, however, do not readily support human-friendly interaction. The approach reported here offers an alternative: navigation with a spatial model and commonsense qualitative spatial reasoning. Both are based on research about how people experience and represent space. The spatial model quickly...

It seems like a battle for ‘space’ has broken out in the Netherlands. Since the fifth National Policy Document on Spatial Planning has just been delivered, the topic spatial planning is high on the agenda of many governmental departments, special interest groups and research institutions. In the many discussions on the national policy document, a common call is the need for more interactive spa...

Demographic data are commonly represented by using a choropleth map, which aggregates the data to arbitrary areal units, causing inaccuracies associated with spatial analysis and distribution. In contrast, dasymetric mapping takes quantitative areal data and attempts to show the underlying statistical surface by breaking up the areal units into zones of relative homogeneity. This thesis applies...

In this article we investigate the application of qualitative spatial reasoning methods for learning the topological map of an unknown environment. We develop a topological mapping framework that achieves robustness against ambiguity in the available information by tracking all possible graph hypotheses simultaneously. We then exploit spatial reasoning to reduce the space of possible hypotheses...

BACKGROUND The availability of big data in healthcare and the intensive development of data reuse and georeferencing have opened up perspectives for health spatial analysis. However, fine-scale spatial studies of ecological and medical databases are limited by the change of support problem and thus a lack of spatial unit interoperability. The use of spatial disaggregation methods to solve this ...

Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is a local spatial statistical technique for exploring spatial nonstationarity. Previous approaches to mapping the results of GWR have primarily employed an equal step classification and sequential no-hue colour scheme for choropleth mapping of parameter estimates. This cartographic approach may hinder the exploration of spatial nonstationarity by inadeq...