ABSTRACT
Current geographical information systems GIS deal almost exclusively with well-defined, static geographical objects ranging from physical landscapes to towns and transport systems. Such objects, exactly located in space, can easily be handled by modern GIS, yet form only a small proportion of all the possible geographical objects.; This book challenges the assumption that the world is compsed of exactly defined and bounded geographic objects such as land parcels, rivers and countries. ignoring the essential complexity of the world, current GIS do not adequately address problems as diverse as the resolution of crime between national boundaries, or the interpretation of views of people from different cultures. This work, bringing together a range of specialists from fields such as linguistics, computer science, land surveying, cartography and soil science, examines current research into the challenges of dealing with geographical phenomena that cannot easily be forced into one of the two current standard data models.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part One|40 pages
Introductions by the Editors
part Two|54 pages
Objects versus Fields: Contrast in Concepts
chapter Chapter Three|11 pages
Towards an Operational Typology of Geographic Entities with Ill-defined Boundaries
chapter Chapter Five|15 pages
A Conceptual Framework and Fuzzy Set Implementation for Geographic Features
part Three|58 pages
Languages to Describe Shape
chapter Chapter Ten|12 pages
Modelling Spatial Objects with Undetermined Boundaries using the Realm/ROSE Approach
part Four|35 pages
Qualitative Topological Relations and Indeterminate Boundaries
chapter Chapter Twelve|17 pages
The ‘Egg-Yolk’ Representation of Regions with Indeterminate Boundaries
part Five|82 pages
Data Models for Indeterminate Objects and Fields
chapter Chapter Thirteen|14 pages
Conceptual Models for Geometry and Quality of Geographic Information
chapter Chapter Fourteen|18 pages
A Syntactic Approach for Handling the Semantics of Fuzzy Spatial Objects
chapter Chapter Seventeen|14 pages
Hierarchical Models for the Definition and Extraction of Terrain Features
part Six|61 pages
Practical Issues of Dealing with Objects with Indeterminate Boundaries
chapter Chapter Eighteen|12 pages
Fuzziness and Uncertainty of Soil Boundaries: From Reality to Coding in GIS
chapter Chapter Nineteen|12 pages
On the Integration of Earth Observation Data: Defining Landscape Boundaries to a GIS
chapter Chapter Twenty|14 pages
How Many Lakes, Islands and Rivers are there in Finland?
part Seven|5 pages
Postscript