Week 3: Thinking Spatially/GIS

How we think about the world around us Associated with cognitive mapping: process by which we acquire, code, store, recall and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in environment

How we come to conclusions about the relationships among phenomena in space

Synthesizing information about spatial relationships in support of decision making

Where are things of value? How to get to where they are from where we are?

The way in which spatial information is encoded and decoded Dependent on rotation of a point of view to a vertical perspective, change and selection of scale, abstraction to a set of symbols

Geographic information systems Technology, information handling strategy A system for capturing, storing, checking, integrating, manipulating, analyzing and displaying data which are spatially referenced to the Earth. This is normally considered to involve a spatially referenced computer database and appropriate applications software

Digital cartography and CAD Database management systems

Connectedness Adjacency Containment Directional

Tabular output Cartographic output

How do we estimate exposure to air pollution for people who may have respiratory or cardiovascular risk factors who live in locations for where we do not have measured air pollution data

How can we incorporate GPS data to improve models of exposure to health harming or promoting factors in the environment

Frequently used for solving location problems and involves the locating of facilities by selecting a set of sites from a larger set of candidate sites