SSIP Schedule

Official government statistics are usually identified by time and geography and hence amenable to display by GIS. Less obvious is the connection of textual documents to time and space, however, news stories usually are about a specific event in a specific place (such as an earthquake in Hawaii or a shark attack off California). In addition, books cataloged in the UC MELVYL catalog are sometimes identified by place which is the subject of the book (i.e. a history of Tulare County California). This talk with discuss projects the speaker is working on to present a unified search portal for census data coupled with finding books about the geographic place being searched for. We have constructed a demonstration system upon the historical census from 1790-1960 for USA
counties which also searches for books in the University catalog. [Demonstration Link]

The second part of the talk will concern itself with the problems of evaluating geographic search upon text, specifically news stories. How does geographic search differ from ordinary search? I.e. how to search for queries like:

The speaker has organized evaluation of geographic text search in European languages (English, German, Portuguese and Spanish) as part of a European digital library initiative to objectively evaluate search and will discuss the role of gazetteers in geographic search.

Date, Time & Venue

Feb 13, 2007. (Tuesday) Noon.

Survey Research Center Conference Room. [Direction.]

Title:

ECAI Dynamic Cultural Atlases

Presenters

Jeanette Zerneke, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Abstract

ECAI is a global consortium working to develop the genre of cultural atlases. This presentation will discuss the methods used by ECAI affiliates to create Cultural Atlases, highlight some our current projects, and give an overview of the kinds of the resources available for scholars and students.

Scholars associated with ECAI are working on a variety of digital cultural atlases, including development of those that are local, regional, and global in focus. These projects in turn are linked in a growing web of interactive dynamic atlases. The ECAI infrastructure for linking these atlases will be demonstrated. Projects highlighted will include: Ivories of Begram, Afghanistan; ECAI Iraq; Batanes Islands Cultural Atlas; and the North American Missions electronic publication.

ECAI has accomplished many of the goals it envisioned at its inception in 1997. However, we now have a greater understanding of the challenges facing implementation of global infrastructure and standards for interoperative cultural atlases. Work on Metadata standards and resource linkage in collaboration with the Information School will be briefly demonstrated.

Tools used to create dynamic cultural atlases are developing rapidly and the resources available to include in them are increasing. The presentation will include a short overview of some of the types of resources available; such as gazetteers, historic maps, and satellite imagery.

Individual Accessibility in Space-Time: Geocomputation and Geovisualization Approaches

Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Dr. Martha L. Corry Faculty Fellow

Conventional accessibility measures based on the notion of locational proximity ignore the role of complex travel behavior and space-time constraints in individual accessibility. As these factors are especially significant in the everyday lives of many individuals, conventional measures may not reveal important differences among individuals. In this presentation, I discuss a conceptualization that conceives individual accessibility as space-time feasibility and describe several formulations of space-time accessibility measures. I describe the implementation of several space-time accessibility measures with a network-based GIS algorithm. Geovisualization using 3D GIS methods will also be used to analyze the activity patterns of human behavior. Implications of this conceptualization of accessibility for social science research will be discussed.