On Methods of Teaching Geography

This study investigates the location and varying spatiality of questions in geography textbooks. The results show that study questions posed in page margins address the three components of spatial thinking—concepts of space, using tools of representation, and processes of reasoning—more than questions in other locations within the text. Three practices are particularly recommended to help students develop spatial thinking skills through answering textbook questions: (1) utilize page-margin questions; (2) select questions around spatial representations; and (3) focus on higher-level cognitive processes.     

Use of Business-Naming Practices to Delineate Vernacular Regions: A Michigan Example

This article provides a history of efforts to map vernacular regions as context for offering readers a way of using business directories in order to construct a GIS-based map of vernacular regions. With Michigan as a case study, the article discusses regional-naming conventions, boundaries, and inclusions and omissions of areas from regional labels in order to offer educators ideas that can enhance classroom content on regions. This article concludes by providing suggestions for classroom activities collecting, analyzing, and discussing vernacular region patterns and processes in accordance with National Geography Standard Five at the eighth-grade level.     

Discourse,representation and urban planning: How a critical approach to discourse helps reveal the spatial re-ordering of street sex work1

This paper shows how a critical approach to discourse sheds light on processes of spatial re-orderings. It uses a case study of urban planning in an area of street sex work to explore the ways in which various representations of prostitution can be used to inform planning decisions. Representations of sex worker identity also expose complex spatial and social geographies and evolving processes of marginalisation and exclusion.     

An object-oriented knowledge representation structure for exploration data integration

Knowledge representation structure and reasoning processes are very important issues in the knowledge-based approach of integrating multiple spatial data sets for resource exploration. An object-oriented knowledge representation structure and corresponding reasoning processes are formulated and tested in this research on the knowledge-based approach of integrating spatial exploration data. The map-based prototype expert system developed in this study has self-contained knowledge representation structure and inference mechanisms. It is important to distinguish between lack of information and information providing negative evidence for a map-based system because the spatial distribution of data sets are uneven in most cases. Error and uncertainty estimation is also an important component of any production expert system. The uncertainty propagation mechanisms developed here work well for this type of integrated exploration problem. Evidential bellef function theory provides a natural theoretical basis for representing and integrating spatially uneven geophysical and geological information. The prototype system is tested using real mineral exploration data sets from the Snow Lake area, northern Manitoba, Canada. The test results outline the favorable exploration areas successfully and show the effectiveness of the knowledge representation structure and inference mechanisms for the knowledge-based approach.     

城市新区作为“家”的表征与实践——以鄂尔多斯康巴什新区为例

本文基于表征与非表征的研究视角,分析了以鄂尔多斯康巴什为代表的中国城市新区作为“家”的表征与实践过程。研究发现：针对康巴什新区,外部媒介与地方政府以表征手段建构了截然不同的“家”的意象。其中,BBC、Times等外媒将康巴什新区描绘成充满荒凉景观的“鬼城”和不健康的中国城市居住空间,而在地方政府的重构中,康巴什新区则充满了生态栖居必备的城市景观并成为了先进的城市文化空间。而作为“家”中的居住者,康巴什居民“家”的营建经历了从陌生到认同的渐进过程,这一过程包含了日常生活实践中的空间转换与情感边界的构建。不同行动者共同塑造了康巴什新区多元的、充满矛盾意义的“家”的空间身份。本文旨在丰富中国快速城市化背景下“家”的地理学研究视角与类型,回应“鬼城”话语对地方政府主导的城市化“无家”的质疑,亦是城市新区社会文化研究的有益拓展与补充。     

Formal representation of qualitative direction

This paper reviews formal approaches to representing spatial knowledge about qualitative direction. Unlike geometric direction information, qualitative information does not employ numerical values but relies on comparison. The qualitative approach is often regarded as suitable for capturing commonsense concepts and thus is relevant to human-centered interfaces for spatial information systems. To establish a context for the work on qualitative direction, we preset a brief history of the development of qualitative temporal and spatial representations from different scientific perspectives. We identify main focal areas of these representations of spatial direction and propose a taxonomy. In the light of more than three decades of fruitful research, we obtain a map of formal representations that reveal interrelationships between different research strands in the field.     

POLITICS AND MEDIA RICHNESS IN WORLD WIDE WEB REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

ABSTRACT. Media-richness theory is applied to World Wide Web sites to demonstrate how Web-page designers are using hypertext markup language to shape conceptions of place and to provide competing visions of the events that have transpired in the former Yugoslavia. We argue that Web sites vary in their interactivity, strategically, to reduce equivocality surrounding conceptions of space and territory. Media-richness theory as applied here allows the development of a heuristic to understand how Web pages communicate information about geographical entities and help to shape perceptions of place.     

A data‐mining approach for assessing consistency between multiple representations in spatial databases

When different spatial databases are combined, an important issue is the identification of inconsistencies between data. Quite often, representations of the same geographical entities in databases are different and reflect different points of view. In order to fully take advantage of these differences when object instances are associated, a key issue is to determine whether the differences are normal, i.e. explained by the database specifications, or if they are due to erroneous or outdated data in one database. In this paper, we propose a knowledge‐based approach to partially automate the consistency assessment between multiple representations of data. The inconsistency detection is viewed as a knowledge‐acquisition problem, the source of knowledge being the data. The consistency assessment is carried out by applying a proposed method called MECO. This method is itself parameterized by some domain knowledge obtained from a second method called MACO. MACO supports two approaches (direct or indirect) to perform the knowledge acquisition using data‐mining techniques. In particular, a supervised learning approach is defined to automate the knowledge acquisition so as to drastically reduce the human‐domain expert's work. Thanks to this approach, the knowledge‐acquisition process is sped up and less expert‐dependent. Training examples are obtained automatically upon completion of the spatial data matching. Knowledge extraction from data following this bottom‐up approach is particularly useful, since the database specifications are generally complex, difficult to analyse, and manually encoded. Such a data‐driven process also sheds some light on the gap between textual specifications and those actually used to produce the data. The methodology is illustrated and experimentally validated by comparing geometrical representations and attribute values of different vector spatial databases. The advantages and limits of such partially automatic approaches are discussed, and some future works are suggested.