Mark Altaweel, Author at GIS Lounge

GIS and CAD Integration

December 18, 2016June 13, 2016 by Mark Altaweel

Mark Altaweel discusses efforts to create a truly integrated system, where CAD components and software concepts work with GIS data.

Personalized GIS

December 18, 2016June 8, 2016 by Mark Altaweel

In the world of personalized GIS, software being developed that can adapt to our behaviors and know what we need before having to request it or it can give us recommendations based on what tastes we have or have had in the past or based on others’ preferences.

Image: Making a Human Body Map -- Pasco Corporation

GIS and Human Anatomy

December 19, 2016May 31, 2016 by Mark Altaweel

Mapping and monitoring the human body in real time using GIS is one area of great opportunity for medical and healthcare professionals.

Intertwining views of sightseeing and eating patterns of tourists on the West Coast of New Zealand over 3 days. In spatial ringmap, each ring represents a sub-regional zone ordered from North to South working outwards. Each sector represents one hour starting from zero o’clock of the first day. The spatial ringmap and the inset map display the temporal and the overall volume of sightseeing (colour) and eating (extrusion) activities in the 20 sub-regional zones respectively.

Multi-view GIS

July 9, 2017May 27, 2016 by Mark Altaweel

Multi-view GIS provides different perspectives of space and time for a given geographic area. There are many ways in which multiple views can be created using GIS software such as ringmaps and augmented reality.

Screenshot from The Big Board system in action which is a an open-source, web based, real time visual collaborative environment that runs on all modern web browsers and uses open-source web standards developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and WorldWideWeb Consortium (W3C). A control panel on left provides access to standard drawing tools and options to share information.

Real-time Collaborative GIS

December 18, 2018May 26, 2016 by Mark Altaweel

Real-time collaborative GIS (RCGIS) enables users, from domain experts to common citizens, to collaborate on given issues and share data easily through a distributed framework.

4D GIS and Prediction

July 13, 2017May 24, 2016 by Mark Altaweel

For the last two decades, GIS technologies have increasingly been used to incorporate not only spatial relationships but also analyzing and visualizing space across time. Spatial-temporal GIS, or 4D GIS, has, in particular, become essential in areas where GIS is needed for predicting dimensions across time.

Query result of GTS spatial data in mongoDB. From: Zhang, Song, & Liu, 2014.

GIS and NoSQL Databases

September 28, 2017May 16, 2016 by Mark Altaweel

Relational databases present some limitations to scaling, preventing or limiting the applicability of big data and real-time data problems utilized within GIS. More and more GIS software companies and developers are adopting NoSQL formats where data retrieval is generally faster and easier to structure. NoSQL also facilitates analysis and integration within a variety of tools, which is why open source GIS has proven to be the most useful arena for NoSQL databases.

Extracted events relating to Hurricane Sandy from 50 CNN news reports for the period Oct 24–Nov 04, 2012. From: Wang & Stewart, 2015).

GIS and Natural Language Processing

March 25, 2019May 3, 2016 by Mark Altaweel

Within GIS, natural language processing can be utilized for spatial understanding of where events, places, or people may relate to a given phenomenon.

A selection of independent predictors of invasion frequency mapped on the study area of Assyria and surrounding states. From Baudains et al, 2015.

Proportional Hazard Modeling and GIS

March 25, 2019April 30, 2016 by Mark Altaweel

By integrating GIS with proportional hazard modeling, we are now beginning to see GIS increasing its analytical modeling repertoire for the sciences that leverage factors of spatial and time to better understand how emergence and evolution of given processes develops, even when uncertainty is persistent for areas of research.

Screenshot from "How to use GIS data with Repast".

Agent-Based Modeling and GIS

December 19, 2016April 29, 2016 by Mark Altaweel

The need to understand emergent phenomenon in a variety of fields has led to not only greater use of agent-based models (ABMs), but we are increasingly seeing tools that integrate GIS with ABMs.