Spatial Context

Reviews / Votes

Chris Gold has devoted much of his research career to techniques of spatial analysis. In this new book many of his most important contributions are assembled in one place for the first time, along with related material, and covering applications that range across the environmental and social sciences. The book will be of great interest to researchers from across those disciplines, as well as to specialists in computer graphics, computational geometry, photogrammetry, cartography, and remote sensing.

Unlike many competing books, the author of this one has chosen to present algorithms descriptively, rather than in code or pseudocode. This makes the book eminently readable, but perhaps of most interest to those who are able to turn the descriptions into code, or to value them as insights into what goes on under the hood of geographic information technologies. The text is very well illustrated with black-and-white diagrams, and mathematical notation is clear and easy to follow.

Spatial context is a concept of great interest to social scientists as they try to understand how behavior is determined by an individual's surroundings. Obesity, drug use, housing segregation, and many other aspects of human behavior depend to some degree on the environment in which the individual lives, and yet much previous research has failed to find accurate ways of capturing spatial context. An individual's ZIP code, for example, is often taken as a convenient but necessarily inacccurate basis for estimating the spatial factors that influence behavior. This book will be helpful to researchers interested in finding better solutions to the problem of characterizing spatial context.

Mike Goodchild, Emeritus Professor and Research Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

The author of the present book is a well-known expert in this eld. His book starts with a presentation of useful geometric primitives like predicates for 3-dimensional intersection detection. The next, and central, topic are geometric structures of immense value to modeling. Most prominently feature the Voronoi diagram, the Delaunay triangulation and the medial axis (or: skeleton). They contain a lot of information about a given scene and are, therefore, widely used in computer science, GIS, mathematics, natural sciences, economics, and ecology. The author discusses surprising properties of these structures, emphasizing general concepts like duality. The third part of the book is devoted to more practically oriented methods used in 2- and 3-dimensional GIS.

In this book, the author presents a rather personal view. His selection of topics, the decision not to include complexity questions or numerical problems, and the wealth of beautiful gures make reading easy. The author's enthusiasm jumps out at his readers and keeps them motivated. This book provides, in a pleasurable way, insight into topics that are not widely known nor easily accessible. Thus, it presents a very nice introduction to spatial analysis.

Rolf Klein, Professor at the University of Bonn. In: Zentralblatt MATH 1376.68001.