This work focuses on integrating land-use location science with the technology of geographic information systems (GIS). The text describes the basic principles of location decision and the means for applying them in order to improve the real estate decision.

Most of the current publications on geographic information systems (GIS) focus on its mechanics, technology, and project-specific applications. This much-needed book, however, introduces the reader to GIS implementation from a management and organizational perspective. GIS is becoming increasingly popular and is evolving from a mapping tool used for support functions to a technology capable of redesigning land administration. In other sectors, information technology has had a dramatic effect on operations. This book examines those cases, and applies them to GIS paradigm, stressing that GIS...

Major advances in the use of geographic information systems have been made in both anthropology and archaeology. Yet there are few published discussions of these new applications and their use in solving complex problems. This book explores these techniques, showing how they have been successfully deployed to pursue research previously considered too difficult--or impossible--to undertake. Among the projects described here are studies of land degradation in the Peruvian Amazon, settlement patterns in the Pacific northwest, ethnic distribution within the Los Angeles garment industry, and...

In an effort to further investigation into critical development facets of geographic information systems (GIS), this book explores the reasoning processes that apply to geographic space and time. As a result of an iniative sponsored by the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), it treats the computational, cognitive and social science applications aspects of spatial and temporal reasoning in GIS. Essays were contributed by scholars from a broad spectrum of disciplines including: geography, cartography, surveying and engineering, computer science, mathematics and...

Can transportation problems be fixed by the right neighborhood design? The tremendous popularity of the "new urbanism" and "livable communities" initiatives suggests that many persons think so. As a systematic assessment of attempts to solve transportation problems through urban design, this book asks and answers three questions: Can such efforts work? Will they be put into practice? Are they a good idea?

Evolutionary models (e.g., genetic algorithms, artificial life), explored in other fields for the past two decades, are now emerging as an important new tool in GIS for a number of reasons. First, they are highly appropriate for modeling geographic phenomena. Secondly, geographical problems are often spatially separate (broken down into local or regional problems) and evolutionary algorithms can exploit this structure. Finally, the ability to store, manipulate, and visualize spatial data has increased to the point that space-time-attribute databases can be easily handled.

Spatial analysis assists theoretical understanding and empirical testing in the social sciences, and rapidly expanding applications of geographic information technologies have advanced the spatial data-gathering needed for spatial analysis and model making. This much-needed volume covers outstanding examples of spatial thinking in the social sciences, with each chapter showing some aspect of how certain social processes can be understood by analyzing their spatial context. The audience for this work is as trans-disciplinary as its authorship because it contains approaches and methodologies...

This book provides a clear conceptual framework, consistent terminology, reference cases, and recommended practices for design, implementation, and management of GII. It is meant for professionals in higher education, practitioners faced with the design, implementation, and maintenance of GII in municipalities, other levels of government and private sector enterprise, as well as the international financial institutions involved with underwriting GII projects.

This book is a contribution to the emerging discipline of Qualitative Spatial Information Theory. This theory will cover time, space, objects in space, their spatial attributes, changes in those attributes, and the temporal structure of those changes. Each of these topics is covered separately in this book, and a theory of qualitative spaces as partitions of quantitative spaces is developed in detail and applied to numerous particular cases.