ABSTRACT
In line with the current information revolution, geographers increasingly make a distinction between
the analysis of spatial data
and
spatial data analysis
. While both types of analyses investigate data having geographical co-ordinates, the former effectively ignores the geographical component and treats the data as if they were aspatial (
inter alia
, Flowerdew and Green 1994), whereas the latter makes use of the geographical component to explore explicitly spatial aspects of the data (
inter alia
, Anselin 1988, Besag 1986). It is this latter characteristic which makes spatial data analysis such a rich field for exploratory investigation. To clarify the distinction, suppose one is interested in the relation between an attribute
Y
and a set of attributes
X
,
X
. . .
