In the past decade, location analysis has outgrown its traditional use in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and has become a critical component in business applications. The vast majority of commercial franchises employ location-based analysis and services in their day-to-day activities. With this growing usage, scalable and manageable solutions for location-based analysis and management have become a necessity rather than an option. Oracle Spatial is the principal component of Oracle that effectively addresses this need for location or spatial information management. This product has...

Environmental decisions must satisfy a multitude of objectives and the matching of a plan, policy or project to such objectives is a matter of both facts and value judgements. Value Functions for Environmental Management provides a systematic approach to the structuring and measurement of value judgements, showing how they drive the decision process and how to make them transparent and effective in support of complex decisions. The value functions that the book describes provide a scheme for the exploration of human values and a tool for transforming them into an analytical...

The idea of this book started at approximately 33.000 feet, somewhere above the Alps. On our way to a workshop in Venice we had the opportunity of appreciating the different types of landscapes and the complex patchwork of urban areas, agriculture, forests, rivers and lakes that can be seen from an aircraft. The complexity of this puzzle, and the complex task of managing its evolution, became the topic of conversation for the rest of the flight. It also became the topic of this book. Land-use management and multicriteria analysis offer countless opportunities for mutual reinforcement. These...