T.Y.BSc.

IT

Sem-6 Principles of Geographic Information Systems

Syllabus
Unit I:
A Gentle Introduction to GIS
The nature of GIS: Some fundamental observations, Defining GIS, GI Systems, GI
Science and GI Applications, Spatial data and Geo information.
The real world and representations of it: Models and modelling, Maps, Databases,
Spatial databases and spatial analysis

Geographic Information and Spatial Database

Models and Representations of the real world
Geographic Phenomena: Defining geographic phenomena, types of geographic
phenomena, Geographic fields, Geographic objects, Boundaries
Computer Representations of Geographic Information: Regular tessellations, irregular
tessellations, Vector representations, Topology and Spatial relationships, Scale and
Resolution, Representation of Geographic fields, Representation of Geographic
objects
Organizing and Managing Spatial Data
The Temporal Dimension

UNIT-I
Chapter 01
A gentle introduction to GIS

Q. What are the different uses of GIS?

• An urban planner might want to assess the extent of urban fringe growth in her/his
city, and quantify the population growth that some suburbs are witnessing. S/he
might also like to understand why these particular suburbs are growing and others
are not.
• A biologist might be interested in the impact of slash-and-burn practices on the
populations of amphibian species in the forests of a mountain range to obtain a
better understanding of long-term threats to those populations.
• A natural hazard analyst might like to identify the high-risk areas of annual
monsoon-related flooding by investigating rainfall patterns and terrain
characteristics.
• A geological engineer might want to identify the best localities for constructing
buildings in an earthquake-prone area by looking at rock formation characteristics;
• A mining engineer could be interested in determining which prospective copper
mines should be selected for future exploration, taking into account
parameters such as extent, depth and quality of the ore body, amongst others;
• A geoinformatics engineer hired by a telecommunications company may want to
determine the best sites for the company’s relay stations, taking into account various
cost factors such as land prices, undulation of the terrain
• A forest manager might want to optimize timber production using data on soil and
current tree stand distributions, in the presence of a number of operational
constraints, such as the need to preserve species diversity in the area;
• A hydrological engineer might want to study a number of water quality parameters
of different sites in a freshwater lake to improve understanding of the current
distribution of Typha reed beds, and why it differs from that of a decade ago.

Q. Define GIS.
A GIS is a computer-based system that provides the following four sets of
capabilities to handle georeferenced data:
1. Data capture and preparation
2. Data management, including storage and maintenance
3. Data manipulation and analysis
4. Data presentation
This implies that a GIS user can expect support from the system to enter
(georeferenced) data, to analyse it in various ways, and to produce
presentations (including maps and other types) from the data. This would include
support for various kinds of coordinate systems and transformations between them,
options for analysis of the georeferenced data, and obviously a large degree of
freedom of choice in the way this information is presented (such as colour scheme,
symbol set, and medium used).
Data capture and preparation: In the El Ni ̃ no case, data capture refers to the
collection of sea water temperatures and wind speed measurements. This is
achieved by placing buoys with measuring equipment at various places in the ocean.
Each buoy measures a number of things: wind speed and direction; air temperature
and humidity; and sea water temperature at the surface and at various depths down
to 500 metres. For the sake of our example we will focus on sea surface temperature
(SST) and wind speed (WS).
A typical buoy is illustrated in Figure, which shows the placement of various sensors
on the buoy. For monitoring purposes, some 70 buoys were deployed at strategic
places within 10◦ latitude of the Equator, between the Galapagos Islands and
Papua New Guinea.
Data management:
For our example application, data management refers to the storage and
maintenance of the data transmitted by the buoys via satellite communication. This
phase requires a decision to be made on how best to represent our data, both in
terms of their spatial properties and the various attribute values which we need to
store.
Data manipulation and analysis:
It appears that the following steps took place for the upper two figures:
1. For each buoy, the average SST for each month was computed, using the daily
SST measurements for that month. This is a simple computation.
2. For each buoy, the monthly average SST was taken together with the geographic
location, to obtain a georeferenced list of averages.
3. From this georeferenced list, through a method of spatial interpolation, the
estimated SST of other positions in the study are were computed. This step
was performed as often as needed, to obtain a fine mesh of positions with measured
or estimated SSTs from which the maps of Figure were eventually derived.
4. We assume that previous to the above steps we had obtained data about average
SST for the month of December for a series of years. This too may have been
spatially interpolated to obtain a ‘normal situation’ December data set of a fine
resolution.
Data presentation:
After the data manipulations discussed above, our data is prepared for producing
output. The data presentation phase deals with putting it all together into a format
that communicates the result of data analysis in the best possible way.
Steps:
• The message we wanted to portray is what are the El Ni n ̃ o and La Ni ̃na events,
both in absolute figures, but also in relative figures, i.e. as differences from a normal
situation.
• The audience for this data presentation.
• The medium was this book, (printed matter of A4 size) and possibly a website.
• The rules of aesthetics demanded many things: the maps should be printed north-
up; with clear georeferencing; with intuitive use of symbols et cetera.
• The techniques that we used included the use of a colour scheme and isolines, plus
a number of other techniques.

Q. Differentiate between GISystems, GIScience and GIS applications:

Functioning GIS requires both hardware and software, and also people such as
GISystems the database creators or administrators, analysts who work with the
software, and the users of the end product.

Geo-Information Science is the scientific field that attempts to integrate different

disciplines studying the methods and techniques of handling spatial information.
Related terms include geoinformatics, geomatics, and spatial information science.
These are all similar terms which have much the same meaning, although each
GIScience approach has slight differences in the way it deals with problems, some
emphasizing engineering approaches, others computational solutions, and so on.

GIS software can (generically) be applied to many different applications. When there
is no risk of ambiguity, people sometimes do not make the distinction between a
‘GIS’ and a ‘GIS application’. Project-based GIS applications usually have a clear-cut
purpose, and these applications can be short-lived: the research is carried out by
collecting data, entering data in the GIS, analysing the data, and producing
informative maps. An example is rapid earthquake damage assessment. Institutional
GIS applications, on the other hand, usually have as their goal the continued
administration of spatial change and the sustained availability of spatial base data.

Q. How will you represent the real world in GIS?

One of the main uses of GIS is as a tool to help us make decisions. Specifically, we
often want to know the best location for a new facility, the most likely sites for
mosquito habitat, or perhaps identify areas with a high risk of flooding so that we
can formulate the best policy for prevention. In using GIS to help make these
decisions, we need to represent some part of the real world as it is, as it was, or
perhaps as we think it will be. We need to restrict ourselves to ‘some part’ of the real
world simply because it cannot be represented completely.
Models and modelling: ‘Modelling’ is a term used in many different ways and which
has many different meanings. A representation of some part of the real world can be
considered a model because the representation will have certain characteristics in
common with the real world. This then allows us to study and operate on the model
itself instead of the real world in order to test what happens under various
conditions, and help us answer ‘what if’ questions. We can change the data or alter
the parameters of the model, and investigate the effects of the changes.

Models—as representations—come in many different flavours. In the GIS

environment, the most familiar model is that of a map. A map is a miniature
representation of some part of the real world. A database can store a considerable
amount of data, and also provides various functions to operate on the stored data.
The collection of stored data represents some real world phenomena, so it too is a
model. Obviously, here we are especially interested in databases that store spatial
data. Digital models (as in a database or GIS) have enormous advantages over paper
models (such as maps). They are more flexible, and therefore more easily changed
for the purpose at hand. In principle, they allow animations and simulations to be
carried out by the computer system. This has opened up an important toolbox that
can help to improve our understanding of the world.

1. Maps: Maps have been used for thousands of years to represent information
about the real world, and continue to be extremely useful for many applications in
various domains. Their conception and design has developed into a science with a
high degree of sophistication. A disadvantage of the traditional paper map is that it
is generally restricted to two-dimensional static representations, and that it is always
displayed in a fixed scale. Cartography, as the science and art of map making,
functions as an interpreter, translating real world phenomena (primary data) into
correct, clear and understandable representations for our use. Maps also become a
data source for other applications, including the development of other maps. With
the advent of computer systems, analogue cartography developed into digital
cartography, and computers play an integral part in modern cartography. Alongside
this trend, the role of the map has also changed accordingly, and the dominance of
paper maps is eroding in today’s increasingly ‘digital’ world.

2. Databases
A database is a repository for storing large amounts of data. It comes with a number
of useful functions:
1. A database can be used by multiple users at the same time—i.e. it allows
concurrent use,
2. A database offers a number of techniques for storing data and allows the use of
the most efficient one—i.e. it supports storage optimization,
3. A database allows the imposition of rules on the stored data; rules that will be
automatically checked after each update to the data—i.e. it supports data integrity,
4. A database offers an easy to use data manipulation language, which allows the
execution of all sorts of data extraction and data updates—i.e. it has a query facility,
5. A database will try to execute each query in the data manipulation language in the
most efficient way—i.e. it offers query optimization.

Q. Write a note on Spatial databases and spatial analysis.

A GIS must store its data in some way. For this purpose the previous generation of
software was equipped with relatively rudimentary facilities. Since the 1990’s there
has been an increasing trend in GIS applications that used a GIS for spatial analysis,
and used a database for storage. In more recent years, spatial databases (also known
as geodatabases) have emerged. Besides traditional administrative data, they can
store representations of real world geographic phenomena for use in a GIS.
These databases are special because they use additional techniques different from
tables to store these spatial representations.
A geodatabase is not the same thing as a GIS, though both systems share a number
of characteristics. These include the functions listed above for databases in general:
concurrency, storage, integrity, and querying, specifically, but not only, spatial data.
A GIS, on the other hand, is tailored to operate on spatial data.
This is probably GIS’s main strength: providing various ways to combine
representations of geographic phenomena. GISs has built-in tools for map
production, of the paper and the digital kind. They operate with an ‘embedded
understanding’ of geographic space. Databases typically lack this kind of
understanding.
Spatial analysis is the generic term for all manipulations of spatial data carried out to
improve one’s understanding of the geographic phenomena that the data
represents. It involves questions about how the data in various layers might relate to
each other, and how it varies over space.
 Chapter 2
Geographic information and Spatial data types
Q. Explain Model and Modeling.
Modelling is the process of producing an abstraction of the ‘real world’ so that some
part of it can be more easily handled.
Depending on the application domain of the model, it may be necessary to
manipulate the data with specific techniques. To investigate the geology of an area,
we may be interested in obtaining a geological classification. This may result in
additional computer representations, again stored in bits and bytes. To examine how
the data is stored inside the GIS, one could look into the actual data files, but this
information is largely meaningless to a normal user.

In order to better understand both our representation of the phenomena, and our
eventual output from any analysis, we can use the GIS to create visualizations from
the computer representation, either on-screen, printed on paper, or otherwise. It is
crucial to understand the fundamental differences between these notions. The real
world, after all, is a completely different domain than the ‘GIS’ world, in which we
build models or simulations of the real world.
Given the complexity of real world phenomena, our models can by definition never
be perfect. We have limitations on the amount of data that we can store, limits on
the amount of detail we can capture, and (usually) limits on the time we have
available for a project.
Any geographic phenomenon can usually be represented in various ways; the choice
of which representation is best depends mostly on two issues. Firstly, what original,
raw data (from sensors or otherwise) is available, and secondly, what sort of data
manipulation is required or will be undertaken.

Q. Define Geographic phenomena.

A GIS operates under the assumption that the relevant spatial phenomena occur in a
two- or three-dimensional Euclidean space, unless otherwise specified. Euclidean
space can be informally defined as a model of space in which locations
Euclidean space are represented by coordinates— (x,y) in 2D; (x,y,z) in 3D—and
Distance and direction can defined with geometric formulas. In the 2D case, this is
known as the Euclidean plane, which is the most common Euclidean space in GIS use.
In order to be able to represent relevant aspects real world phenomena inside a GIS,
we first need to define what it is we are referring to. We might define a geographic
phenomenon as a manifestation of an entity or process of interest that:
• Can be named or described,
• Can be georeferenced, and
• Can be assigned a time (interval) at which it is/was present.
The relevant phenomena for a given application depends entirely on one’s
objectives. For instance, in water management, the objects of study might be river
basins, agro-ecologic units, measurements of actual evapotranspiration,
meteorological data, ground water levels, irrigation levels, water budgets and
measurements of total water use.

Q. Write a note on Geographic fields.

A field is a geographic phenomenon that has a value ‘everywhere’ in the study area.
We can therefore think of a field as a mathematical function f that associates a
specific value with any position in the study area. Hence if (x,y) is a position in the
study area, then f(x,y) stands for the value of the field f at locality (x,y).
Fields can be discrete or continuous. In a continuous field, the underlying function is
assumed to be ‘mathematically smooth’, meaning that the field values along any
path through the study area do not change abruptly, but only gradually.
A continuous field can even be differentiable, meaning we can determine a measure
of change in the field value per unit of distance anywhere and in any direction. For
example, if the field is elevation, this measure would be slope, i.e. the change of
elevation per metre distance; if the field is soil salinity, it would be salinity gradient,
i.e. the change of salinity per metre distance. Discrete fields divide the study space in
mutually exclusive, bounded parts, with all locations in one part having the same
field value. Typical examples are land classifications, for instance, using either
geological classes, soil type, land use type, crop type or natural vegetation type.

Essentially, these two types of fields differ in the type of cell values. A discrete field
like land use type will store cell values of the type ‘integer’. Therefore it is also called
an integer raster. Discrete fields can be easily converted to polygons, since it is
relatively easy to draw a boundary line around a group of cells with the same value.
A continuous raster is also called a ‘floating point’ raster. A field-based model
consists of a finite collection of geographic fields: we may be interested in elevation,
barometric pressure, mean annual rainfall, and maximum daily evapotranspiration,
and thus use four different fields to model the relevant phenomena within our study
area.
Q. Which are the different Data types used in GIS?
1. Nominal data values are values that provide a name or identifier so that we can
discriminate between different values, but that is about all we can do. Specifically,
we cannot do true computations with these values. An example is the names of
geological units. This kind of data value is called categorical data when the values
assigned are sorted according to some set of non-overlapping categories. For
example, we might identify the soil type of a given area to belong to a certain (pre-
defined) category.
2. Ordinal data values are data values that can be put in some natural sequence but
that do not allow any other type of computation. Household income, for instance,
could be classified as being either ‘low’, ‘average’ or ‘high’. Clearly this is their natural
sequence, but this is all we can say—we can not say that a high income is twice as
high as an average income.
3. Interval data values are quantitative, in that they allow simple forms of
computation like addition and subtraction. However, interval data has no arithmetic
zero value, and does not support multiplication or division. For instance, a
temperature of 20◦ C is not twice as warm as 10◦C, and thus centigrade temperatures
are interval data values, not ratio data values.
4. Ratio data values allow most, if not all, forms of arithmetic computation.

Q. Write a note on Geographic objects.

When a geographic phenomenon is not present everywhere in the study area, but
somehow ‘sparsely’ populates it, we look at it as a collection of geographic objects.
Such objects are usually easily distinguished and named, and their position in space
is determined by a combination of one or more of the following parameters:
• Location (where is it?),
• Shape (what form is it?),
• Size (how big is it?), and
• Orientation (in which direction is it facing?).
How we want to use the information about a geographic object determines
which of the four above parameters is required to represent it. For instance, in an in-
car navigation system, all that matters about geographic objects like petrol stations is
where they are. Thus, location alone is enough to describe them in this particular
context, and shape, size and orientation are not necessarily relevant.
In the same system, however, roads are important objects, and for these some notion
of location (where does it begin and end), shape (how many lanes does it have), size
(how far can one travel on it) and orientation (in which direction can one travel on it)
seem to be relevant information components.

Shape is usually important because one of its factors is dimension. This relates to
whether an object is perceived as a point feature, or a linear, area or volume feature.
The petrol stations mentioned above apparently are zero-dimensional, i.e. they are
perceived as points in space; roads are one-dimensional, as they are considered to
be lines in space. In another use of road information—for instance, in multi-purpose
cadastre systems where precise location of sewers and manhole covers matters—
roads might well be considered to be two-dimensional entities, i.e. areas within
which a manhole cover may fall.

Collections of geographic objects can be interesting phenomena at a higher

aggregation level: forest plots form forests, groups of parcels form suburbs, streams,
brooks and rivers form a river drainage system, roads form a road network, and SST
buoys form an SST sensor network. It is sometimes useful to view geographic
phenomena at this more aggregated level and look at characteristics like coverage,
connectedness, and capacity. For example:
• Which part of the road network is within 5 km of a petrol station?
(A coverage question)
• What is the shortest route between two cities via the road network?
(A connectedness question)
• How many cars can optimally travel from one city to another in an hour?
(A capacity question)

Q. What do you mean by boundaries? What are its types?

Location, shape and size are fully determined if we know an area’s boundary, so the
boundary is a good candidate for representing it. This is especially true for areas that
have naturally crisp boundaries. A crisp boundary is one that can be determined with
almost arbitrary precision, dependent only on the data acquisition technique applied.
Fuzzy boundaries contrast with crisp boundaries in that the boundary is not a precise
line, but rather itself an area of transition.
As a general rule-of-thumb, crisp boundaries are more common in man-made
phenomena, whereas fuzzy boundaries are more common with natural
phenomena. In recent years, various research efforts have addressed the issue of
explicit treatment of fuzzy boundaries, but there is still limited support for these in
existing GIS software.

Q. Explain Regular tessellations. What are its types? Explain in detail.

A tessellation (or tiling) is a partitioning of space into mutually exclusive cells that
together make up the complete study space. With each cell, some (thematic) value is
associated to characterize that part of space. Three regular tessellation types are
illustrated in Figure. In a regular tessellation, the cells are the same shape and size.
The simplest example is a rectangular raster of unit squares, represented in a
computer in the 2D case as an array of n×m elements.

In all regular tessellations, the cells are of the same shape and size, and the
field attribute value assigned to a cell is associated with the entire area occupied by
the cell. The square cell tessellation is by far the most commonly used, mainly
because georeferencing a cell is so straightforward. These tessellations are known
under various names in different GIS packages, but most frequently as rasters.

A raster is a set of regularly spaced (and contiguous) cells with associated (field)
values. The associated values represent cell values, not point values. This means that
the value for a cell is assumed to be valid for all locations within the cell.
The size of the area that a single raster cell represents is called the raster’s resolution.
Sometimes, the word grid is also used, but strictly speaking, a grid refers to values at
the intersections of a network of regularly spaced horizontal and perpendicular lines
The field value of a cell can be interpreted as one for the complete tessellation cell, in
which case the field is discrete, not continuous or even differentiable.
To improve on this continuity issue, we can do two things:
•Make the cell size smaller, so as to make the ‘continuity gaps’ between the cells
smaller, and/or
•Assume that a cell value only represents elevation for one specific location in the
cell, and to provide a good interpolation function for all other locations that has the
continuity characteristic.
The location associated with a raster cell is fixed by convention, and may be
the cell centroid (mid-point) or, for instance, its left lower corner. Values for
other positions than these must be computed through some form of interpolation
function, which will use one or more nearby field values to compute the value at the
requested position. This allows us to represent continuous, even differentiable,
functions.
An important advantage of regular tessellations is that we know how they partition
space, and we can make our computations specific to this partitioning. This leads to
fast algorithms.

Q. What is Irregular tessellations. How will you create quad tree? Explain with
example.
These are partitions of space into mutually disjoint cells, but now the cells may vary
in size and shape, allowing them to adapt to the spatial phenomena that they
represent.
A well-known data structure in this family—upon which many more variations have
been based—is the region quad tree. It is based on a regular tessellation of square
cells, but takes advantage of cases where neighbouring cells have the same field
value, so that they can together be represented as one bigger cell. A simple
illustration is provided in Figure. It shows a 8×8 raster with three possible field
values: white, green and blue. The quad tree that represents this raster is
constructed by repeatedly splitting up the area into four quadrants, which are
called NW, NE, SE, SW for obvious reasons. This procedure stops when all the
cells in a quadrant have the same field value. The procedure produces an upside-
down, tree-like structure, known as a quad tree.
Quadtrees are adaptive because they apply the spatial auto correlation principle, i.e.
that locations that are near in space are likely to have similar field values. When a
conglomerate of cells has the same value, they are represented together in the
quadtree, provided boundaries coincide with the predefined quadrant
boundaries.

Q. What do you mean by Vector representations. Explain with example.

In vector representations, an attempt made to explicitly associate georeferences with
the geographic phenomena. A georeferences explicitly is a coordinate pair from
some geographic space, and is also known as a vector. A representation for
geographic fields can be considered a hybrid between tessellations and vector
representation.

Triangulated Irregular Networks: A commonly used data structure in GIS software

is the triangulated irregular network, or TIN. It is one of the standard implementation
techniques for digital terrain models, but it can be used to represent any continuous
field. The principles behind a TIN are simple. It is built from a set of locations for
which we have a measurement, for instance an elevation. The locations can be
arbitrarily scattered in space, and are usually not on a nice regular grid. Any location
together with its elevation value can be viewed as a point in three-dimensional
space. From these 3D points, we can construct an irregular tessellation made of
triangles. Two such tessellations are illustrated in Figure.

Some tessellations are better than others, in the sense that they make smaller errors
of elevation approximation. For instance, if we base our elevation computation for
location P on the left hand shaded triangle, we will get another value than from the
right hand shaded triangle.
A TIN clearly is a vector representation: each anchor point has a stored
georeference. Yet, we might also call it an irregular tessellation, as the chosen
triangulation provides a partitioning of the entire study space. However, in this case,
the cells do not have an associated stored value as is typical of tessellations, but
rather a simple interpolation function that uses the elevation values of its three
anchor points.

Q. Write a note on Vector Data Representation.

Or
Explain the Boundary Model for area representation with an example.
Point representations:
Points are used to represent objects that are best described as shape- and size-less,
one-dimensional features. Whether this is the case really depends on the purposes
of the spatial application and also on the spatial extent of the objects compared to
the scale applied in the application. For a tourist city map, a park will not usually be
considered a point feature, but perhaps a museum will, and certainly a public phone
booth might be represented as a point.
Besides the georeference, usually extra data is stored for each point object. This so-
called attribute or thematic data, can capture anything that is considered relevant
about the object. For phone booth objects, this may include the owning telephone
company, the phone number, or the data last serviced.
Line representations:
Line data are used to represent one-dimensional objects such as roads, rail roads,
canals, rivers and power lines. Again, there is an issue of relevance for the application
and the scale that the application requires. For the example application of mapping
tourist information, bus, subway and streetcar routes are likely to be relevant line
features. Some cadastral systems, on the other hand, may consider roads to be two-
dimensional features, i.e. having a width as well.

Collections of (connected) lines may represent phenomena that are best viewed as
networks. With networks, specific types of interesting questions arise that have to do
with connectivity and network capacity. These relate to applications such Networks
as traffic monitoring and watershed management. With network elements—i.e. the
lines that make up the network—extra values are commonly associated like distance,
quality of the link, or carrying capacity.
Area representations:
When area objects are stored using a vector approach, the usual technique is
to apply a boundary model. This means that each area feature is represented by
some arc/node structure that determines a polygon as the area’s boundary.
Common sense dictates that area features of the same kind are best stored Polygons
in a single data layer, represented by mutually non-overlapping polygons. In
essence, what we then get is an application-determined (i.e. adaptive) partition of
space.
Observe that a polygon representation for an area object is yet another example of a
finite approximation of a phenomenon that inherently may have a curvi-linear
boundary.

A simple but naive representation of area features would be to list for each polygon
simply the list of lines that describes its boundary. Each line in the list would, as
before, be a sequence that starts with a node and ends with one, possibly with
vertices in between.
The line that makes up the boundary between them is the same, which means that
using the above representation the line would be stored twice, namely once for each
polygon. This is a form of data duplication—known as data redundancy—which is (at
least in theory,) unnecessary, although it remains a feature of some systems. There is
another disadvantage to such polygon-by-polygon representations. If we want to
find out which polygons border the bottom left polygon, we have to do a rather
complicated and time-consuming analysis comparing the vertex lists of all boundary
lines with that of the bottom left polygon.
The boundary model is an improved representation that deals with these
disadvantages. It stores parts of a polygon’s boundary as non-looping arcs and
indicates which polygon is on the left and which is on the right of each arc. A simple
example of the boundary model is provided in Figure. It illustrates which additional
information is stored about spatial relationships between lines and polygons.
Obviously, real coordinates for nodes (and vertices) will also be stored in another
table.
Q. What do you mean by Topology and spatial relationships.
General spatial topology:
Topology deals with spatial properties that do not change under certain
transformations. For example, features drawn on a sheet of rubber can be made to
change in shape and size by stretching and pulling the sheet. However, some
properties of these features do not change:
•Area E is still inside area D,
•The neighbourhood relationships between A,B,C,D, and E stay intact, and their
boundaries have the same start and end nodes, and
•The areas are still bounded by the same boundaries, only the shapes and lengths of
their perimeters have changed.

Topological relationships are built from simple elements into more complex
elements: nodes define line segments, and line segments connect to define lines,
which in turn define polygons.
In what follows below, we will look at aspects of topology in two ways. Firstly, using
simplices, we will look at how simple elements (points) can be combined to define
more complex ones (lines and polygons). Secondly, we will examine the logical
aspects of topological relationships using set-theory.

Topological relationships:
The mathematical properties of the geometric space used for spatial data can be
described as follows:
•The space is a three-dimensional Euclidean space where for every point we can
determine its three-dimensional coordinates as a triple (x,y,z) of real numbers. In this
space, we can define features like points, lines, polygons, and volumes as geometric
primitives of the respective dimension. A point is zero-dimensional, a line one-
dimensional, a polygon two-dimensional, and a volume is a three-dimensional
primitive.
•The space is a metric space, which means that we can always compute the distance
between two points according to a given distance function. Such a function is also
known as a metric.
•The space is a topological space, of which the definition is a bit complicated.
In essence, for every point in the space we can find a neighbourhood around it that
fully belongs to that space as well.
•Interior and boundary are properties of spatial features that remain invariant under
topological mappings. This means, that under any topological mapping, the interior
and the boundary of a feature remains unbroken and intact.

There are a number of advantages when our computer representations of

geographic phenomena have built-in sensitivity of topological issues. Questions
related to the ‘neighbourhood’ of an area are a point in case. To obtain some
‘topological sensitivity’ simple building blocks have been proposed with which more
complicated representations can be constructed:
•We can define within the topological space, features that are easy to handle and
that can be used as representations of geographic objects. These features are called
simplices as they are the simplest geometric shapes of some dimension: point (0-
simplex), line segment (1-simplex), triangle (2-simplex), and tetrahedron (3-simplex).
•When we combine various simplices into a single feature, we obtain a simplicial
complex.

Q. Explain the eight Spatial Relationships in two dimensions.

Suppose we consider a spatial region A. It has a boundary and an interior, both
seen as (infinite) sets of points, and which are denoted by boundary(A) and
interior(A), respectively. We consider all possible combinations of intersections(∩)
between the boundary and the interior of A with those of another region B, and test
whether they are the empty set (∅) or not. From these intersection patterns, we can
derive eight (mutually exclusive) spatial relationships between two regions. If, for
instance, the interiors of A and B do not intersect, but their boundaries do, yet a
boundary of one does not intersect the interior of the other, we say that A and B
meet.

Figure shows all eight spatial relationships: disjoint, meets, equals, inside, covered by,
contains, covers, and overlaps. These relationships can be used in queries against a
spatial database, and represent the ‘building blocks’ of more complex spatial queries.

Q. Write about the set of rules that defines the topological consistency.
Q. Write a note the temporal dimension.
Geographic phenomena are also dynamic; they change over time.
Examples of the kinds of questions involving time include:
• Where and when did something happen?
• How fast did this change occur?
• In which order did the changes happen?
Representing time in GIS:
• Spatiotemporal data models are ways of organizing representations of space
and time in a GIS.
• The most common of these is a ‘snapshot’ state that represents a single point
in time of an ongoing natural or man-made process.
• We may store a series of these snapshot states to represent change
Different ‘concepts’ of time:
• Discrete and continuous time : Time can be measured along a discrete or
continuous scale.
• Discrete time is composed of discrete elements (seconds, minutes, hours,
days, months, or years).
• In continuous time, no such discrete elements exist, and for any two different
points in time, there is always another point in between. Derive temporal
relationships between events and periods such as ‘before’, ‘overlap’, and
‘after’.
• Valid time and transaction time: Valid time (or world time) is the time when an
event really happened, or a string of events took place. Transaction time (or
database time) is the time when the event was stored in the database or GIS.
• Linear, branching and cyclic time: Time can be considered to be linear,
extending from the past to the present (‘now’), and into the future. Branching
time—in which different time lines from a certain point in time onwards are
possible—and cyclic time—in which repeating cycles such as seasons or days
of a week are recognized.
• Time granularity: When measuring time, granularity is the precision of a time
value in a GIS or database (e.g. year, month, day, second, etc.). Different
applications may obviously require different granularity.
• Absolute and relative time: Time can be represented as absolute or relative.
Absolute time marks a point on the time line where events happen (e.g. ‘6 July
1999 at 11:15 p.m.’). Relative time is indicated relative to other points in time
(e.g. ‘yesterday’, ‘last year’, ‘tomorrow’, which are all relative to ‘now’, or ‘two
weeks later’.
• Change detection: Studies of this type are usually based on some ‘model of
change’, which includes knowledge and hypotheses of how change occurs for
the specific phenomena being studied. It includes knowledge about speed of
tree growth.
• Spatiotemporal analysis: we consider changes of spatial and thematic
attributes over time. We can keep the spatial domain fixed and look only at
the attribute changes over time for a given location in space.
• On the other hand, we can keep the attribute domain fixed and consider the
spatial changes over time for a given thematic attribute.
• This may lead to notions of object motion, a subject receiving increasing
attention in the literature. Applications of moving object research include
traffic control, mobile telephony, wildlife tracking, vector-borne disease
control, and weather forecasting.
• Object identity: When does a change or movement cause an object to
disappear and become a new one? With wildlife this is quite obvious.