This paper discusses applications of a revolutionary information technology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), in the field of the history of cartography by examples, including assessing accuracy of early maps, establishing a database of places and historical administrative units in history, integrating early maps in GIS or digital images, and analyzing social, political, and economic infor...

The significant function of GIS technology in promoting the railway development in this information era is now attracting great attention from the Ministry of Railway and the State decision-making institutions of the P.R.China. However, until present, the GIS has not been economised on the Chinese Railway. Discussions have been made on the several critical issues in building up the railway GIS....

The geographic context is essential both for environmental research, and for policyoriented environmental management. Geographic information systems are as a result increasingly important computing applications in this domain, and an understanding of the underlying principles of geographic information science is increasingly essential to sound scientific practice. The review begins by defining ...

Africa is generally held to be in crisis, and the quality of life for the majority of the continent's inhabitants has been declining in both relative and absolute terms. In addition, the majority of the world's disease burden is realised in Africa. Geographical information systems (GIS) technology, therefore, is a tool of great inherent potential for health research and management in Africa. Th...

Geographic information systems (GIS) represent more than a tool for spatial data handling. Qualitative and mixed-methods approaches with GIS value the suite of spatial methods and technologies, while typically showing a marked sensitivity toward issues of subjectivity, knowledge-production, exclusion, reflexivity, and power relations. And although recent research in the use of qualitative GIS d...

BACKGROUND Geographic information systems (GIS) are increasingly recognized tools in maternal health. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the use of GIS in maternal health and to identify knowledge gaps and opportunities. SEARCH STRATEGY Keywords broadly related to maternal health and GIS were used to search for academic articles and gray literature. SELECTION CRITERIA Reviewed articles focused on mat...

The field of GIS (S for Systems, Sciences, Services, and Studies) is at a cross-road in the early 2010s. Aiming to link the multiple visions for the next phase of GIS development, this article suggests that the emerging open GIS should serve as a guiding concept. Contextualized in the broader literature of open science, this article proposes open GIS should include eight dimensions related to d...

Change detection by unmixing has been shown to provide enhanced change detection performance for hyperspectral images with respect to more traditional approaches, especially when the temporal images contain sub-pixel level changes. In a recent paper, change detection by spectral unmixing was investigated in detail and the advantages that can be gained by using such an approach were systematical...

A hybrid (signal-symbol) approach for detecting significant changes in imagery uses a signal-based change detection algorithm followed by a symbol-based change interpreter. The change detection algorithm is based on a linear prediction model which uses small patches from a reference image to locally model the corresponding areas in a newly acquired image, and vice versa. Areas that cannot be ac...

An enduring problem in electoral systems is that of "disproportionality," i.e., the mismatch between a party's percentage of the popular vote and its percentage of legislative seats. Such disproportionality is quite common and extreme cases are easy to find in the real word. To give just one example, the Liberal Party in Britain polled 13.8% of the national vote in 1979 but was rewarded with on...