ABSTRACT
In recent years a flood of digital data has become available, as various agencies begin to uti - lize the power of the Internet in data transfer and exchange, as new form of data co llection devices such as GPS (Global Positioning System) come into routine use, and as agencies and organizations such as tax authorities and realtors begin to develop comprehensive databases and listing services. Integration of diverse data sources at the urban level is opening up dramatic opportunities for urban researchers and planners to develop many new types of application. Combining data sets which have hitherto not been related enables new checks on accuracy and precision, methods for providing miss ing data in one source from another, and predictions of data outside the immediate domain of interest. At the other extreme, such integration enables new theories of urban form and functioning to be formulated and tested, such as those which have appeared recently in nonlinear dynamics (Dendrinos 1992, Lepetit and Pumain 1993) and urban morphology (Batty and Longley 1994, Frankhauser 1994). In a middle ground between such pragmatic and theoretical concerns, the emergence of new styles of analysis close to the data, which enable explorations of spatial pattern (Fotheringham and Rogerson 1994), seeks to use new methods of making comparisons and combinations of diverse digital data in informed visual ways.
