Geog 176B Lecture 2:

Representing Geography
[Text: Ch. 3]
http://www.mondodisotto.it/imageiraq/
A map is a representation
Geometry is orthographic
and scaled
Features are
symbolized
Why do we use representations?
How do we gather information?
Limits on human senses
Sight
Visible spectrum (400-800 nm)
LOS, Horizon, Visibility
Sound
Audible spectrum (50-15K Hz)
Range to 100m
Taste, touch, smell
Rather limited spatial range
Limited sensory distinction
Everything else we know about the world we
know through communication
text
speech
maps
photographs
radio, TV
Internet
databases
Knowledge of the surface of the Earth
500,000,000 sq km
On average 100 sq m is sensed directly at any
point in time
Odds of being in the right place at the right time
p=100/500,000,000,000,000= 0.000 000 000 000 2
Odds are trillions to one
Lotto odds are 25.8 million to one
Can extend that through migration, travel
Mike Goodchilds Counties
Visited
5 billion years
If we live through 70
p=70/5,000,000,000=0.000 000 014
So, we can know almost nothing about the
surface of the Earth via our senses alone
We rely on communicated
information to:
decide where to go as tourists, shoppers
run large corporations
manage agriculture, forestry
choose where to live
Travel from A to B
Understand geography!
All such information must use a
representation
What is communicated is a representation
of the real thing
Locations in time and space are reduced to a
few symbols
Communication requires simplification
The real world is infinitely complex
So representations reduce information to a
manageable volume
Representations occur:
In the human mind, in memory and
reasoning (e = m c
2
)
In speech (e.g. acromyns)
In written text (abbreviations, etc.)
In photographs
In digital databases
and in GIS
Digital representation
Much (most?) human
communication is now digital
sent through a "pipe" or transmission channel that
can transmit only 0s and 1s
stored on devices that can store only 0s and 1s
processed as 0s and 1s
text in email, word processors uses ASCII (1 & 0)
voice in telephone
music on CD
DVD, digital TV
FAX
Digits, distance, and
communication
When two humans communicate at a
distance, chances are the content is
expressed at some point in digital form
The further the distance the more likely the
communication is digital
The longer/denser the communication, the
more likely it is digital
Digital
From "digit" meaning finger
A character in a counting system
How many symbols?
0 thru 9, A-Z, a-z, etc.
All can reduce to 0 and 1
To all intents and purposes
"digital"=binary
The digital translation challenge
How can we express knowledge exclusively
in 0s and 1s?
How can we describe what we know about
the world in 0s and 1s?
How do we capture complex earth features
as representations?
Digital vs Analog
analog
information expressed by scaling quantities
good for quantitative information
a paper map is analog
world is scaled to a miniature representation
representative fraction is key, e.g. 1:24,000
digital
information expressed by symbols
requires a coding scheme of representation in symbols
sender and receiver must agree on the scheme
what does digital scale mean?
Digital Coding of Text
ASCII code one code per character
A = 65, B = 66, etc.
26 letters plus common symbols
originally 128, extended to 256
8 binary digits (one byte) per character
Digital equivalents
Images: JPEG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, ...
Sound: MIDI, MP3, WAV
FAX: CCITT
Maps, geographic information: GIS data
models and structures
Digital coding schemes important
in GIS
ASCII
eight bits per character, names, text annotation
integer
3 bits per decimal digit, n bits give 2^n options, or 32 bits per
whole number (short, long integer)
float (single precision)
1 sign bit, 7 exponent bits (-63 to +63), 24 mantissa bits (8
significant digits)
double precision
1 sign bit, 7 exponent bits, 56 mantissa bits (18 significant
digits)
BLOB binary large object
What if you received this
message:
0100 1000 0110 0101 0110 1100
0110 1100 0110 1111 0010 0000
0111 0111 0110 1111 0111 0010
0110 1100 0110 0100
The Message on Voyager
<http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html>
Communication of information
via a channel
Claude Shannons Model
C. E. Shannon: A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, pp.
379423 and 623656, July and October, 1948.
How efficient is the channel of communication?
Is there information that can't be expressed, e.g. in text
What are the limits of a GIS as a communication channel?
What information about a place can't be expressed in GIS?
Is the message optimally expressed in the coding system?
What if the sender and receiver can't understand each
other?
different language
different alphabet
different GIS
different data model
Geographic Representation
Geographic information
information about some place on the surface of the
Earth
or near the surface
at some point in time
one of the earliest forms of shared information
hunters and gatherers reporting back to the band
early stick maps for navigation in the Pacific
drawings on cave walls
Ancient geographical representations
Source: http://www.khadijateri.com/tribes4.jpg
http://bernard.pitzer.edu/~dsegal/1492/FIGURES/

Libyan cave paintings
Marshall Islands Stick Chart
And its so different today!
Enter paper
the printing press in the 15th Century
information accessible to all
shared knowledge as a human community
asset
Book: Prince Henry the Navigator, 1394-
1460
Global internet use
World Regions
Source:www.internetworldstats.com


Population
( 2005 Est.)

Populati
on
% of
World

Internet Usage,
Latest Data

% Users

Usage
% of
World

Usage
Growth
2000-2005

Africa

896,721,874

14.0 %

23,917,500

2.7 %

2.5 %

429.8 %

Asia

3,622,994,130

56.4 %

332,590,713

9.2 %

34.2 %

191.0 %

Europe

804,574,696

12.5 %

285,408,118

35.5 %

29.3 %

171.6 %

Middle East

187,258,006

2.9 %

16,163,500

8.6 %

1.7 %

392.1 %

North America

328,387,059

5.1 %

224,103,811

68.2 %

23.0 %

107.3 %

Latin America/Caribbean

546,723,509

8.5 %

72,953,597

13.3 %

7.5 %

303.8 %

Oceania / Australia

33,443,448

0.5 %

17,690,762

52.9 %

1.8 %

132.2 %

WORLD TOTAL

6,420,102,722

100.0 %

972,828,001

15.2 %

100.0 %

169.5



An atom of geographic
information
<location, time, attribute>

It's mild today in Santa Barbara
Vs.
At 3425'33" North, 11942'51" West at noon
PST the temperature was 14 Celsius
Standardization
general methods for describing location
everyone around the world understands latitude
and longitude
similarly for time (International Meridian
Conference 1884)
attributes must also be generally understood
mild" is subjective and relative
-14 Celsius is generally understood
Did Hugh Grant climb a hill or a mountain?
The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But
Came Down a Mountain (1995)

Two English cartographers visit the small South Wales
village of Ffynnon Garw, to measure what is claimed to be
the "first mountain inside of Wales". It's 1917, and the war in
Europe continues. The villagers are very proud of their
"mountain", and are understandably dissapointed and furious
to find that it is in fact a "hill". Not to be outwitted by a rule
(and the Englishmen who enforce it), the villagers set out to
make their hill into a mountain, but to do so they must keep
the English from leaving, before the job is done.
Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112966
Hill: A well-defined natural elevation
smaller than a mountain.
Suppose we could capture it all
A complete representation of the planet
Past, present, and future
A "mirror world
Douglas Adams computer for the search
for the ultimate question whose answer is
42
AKA Digital Earth
How many atoms are there?
An infinite number
To make a two-word description of every sq km
on the planet would require 10 Gigabytes
To store one number for every square meter on the
planet would require 1 Petabyte (=1000 Terabytes
= 1,000,000 gigabytes= 1 billion megabytes
That's too many for any current computing system
How do we limit file size?
Reduce the level of detail, aggregate, generalize,
approximate
Ignore the water
that's 2/3 of the planet
One temperature for all of California
one number for an entire polygon
Sample the space
only measure at weather stations
because temperature varies slowly
All geographic data miss detail
All are uncertain to some degree
Objects and Fields
Given that (1) we must digitally represent the
world to gather (gain) knowledge about it and (2)
all representations of the earth are imperfect; then
The most important of the options is how we think
about (and model) the world
Cartographic representation led to the feature
model
Remote sensing led to the field model
Both are useful
The Cartographic Heritage
Discrete objects
Point, lines, areas (or volumes) having
known properties
Littering an otherwise empty space
Objects can be manipulated/edited
Objects can be found in the real world
Objects may overlap
Objects can be counted
Favoring Measurement: Fields
Things it's worth measuring at every location on
the planet
temperature
soil pH
soil type
land cover type
elevation
rainfall
tax rates
Fields
Fields contain variables that have one value
everywhere
The value of the variable is a function of
location
field = a way of conceiving of geography as
a set of variables each having one value at
every location on the planet
z = f (x , y , z , t)
Can represent one variable as:
polygons
grids
TIN
sample points
contours
Fields and Objects
Objects are intuitive, part of everyday life
Fields are more associated with science and
measurement
Both objects and fields can be represented
either in raster or in vector form
Both may need to coexist in a GIS
One geodatabase can have multiple representations
of a feature