地理信息系统文献翻译——背景综述

我们的世界是动态的。在地球的各个组成部分变化时常发生着，包括在其岩石圈，水圈，生物圈以及大气层。尽管人类活动在动态世界中不是新的行为，但在过去，困扰对这些变化的研究和理解的主要因素是来自于获取大量临时数据的局限性，以及缺乏对这种数据发现其规律、关系和变化趋势的一系列适宜的方法手段和技术。

在过去几十年里，这种局势有所改变。时空数据赢得了较为重要的地位。周期性的地球观测，尤其是其提供的丰富数据来源，在某种程度上可以说，这些数据并还没有被完全开发出来。然而，对这些富裕的数据获取有用信息的新兴技术手段在不断被提高，而且研究仍然在继续。数据开采，KDD（认识发现数据库），普通的科学形象化以及特殊的地球形象化（见第二章）都可以根据这方面被展现到。

监视，则是对空间的动态分析的一个重要应用。监控手段，举个例子来说，就是对许多可持续发展部门、灾害防御部门，预告警示部门以及急救回应部门的一个整体控制。空间的变化是由于空间现象的特征发生了滞后性的变化（见第三章）。因此，无论是监控手段被应用于哪种领域，其目的都是通过对数据的一系列挖掘和分析，从而对研究实验中的变化多端的现象进行准确地跟踪。这些行为给予了关于发现变化规律、变化关系及其趋势的一些信息。 同时，该方式反过来可以被运用到警示可能发生的不良情况，如冲突等，对变化情况进行建模，或推断他们的将来趋势。

尽管监视监控方面的专家常利用（数据）地图和影像，他们仍然强烈依靠计算方法去揭示变化所反应的时间空间数据集信息。人类迅速“看见”形状，模型，关系，趋势和移动的能力是非常强大的。因此，在涉及有关信息的提取过程当中，从视觉上探索图形呈现形式的更多选择或许可以为计算方法做进一步的补充。尤其是在要求定性更精确的情况下，以视觉为基础的方法与以计算方法为基础的功能在同环境内相辅相成（譬如直接与GIS挂钩或嵌入地地与其相关联），丰富的探索和分析方法与工具为用户进行决策提供了支持（见 Takatsuka & Gahegan例, 2002）。

在计算机支持的可视化方法的框架下，动画似乎更是卓越地完成了对空间动态的视觉监测，因为它能使观众在时空双方面同时获取相关数据。从而，世界范围内的各种现象其动态表现方面可以轻松地被观测，时空规律、趋势以及各种相关关系都可以比那些不够明显的纯数字信息或.......

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 General background  

Our world is dynamic. Changes occur constantly in all the components of the earth’s system: its lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and atmosphere. Although human interest in the world’s dynamics is not new, in the past major factors that inhibited the study and understanding of these changes were the limited availability of large temporal data sets and a lack of suitable methods and techniques to discover patterns, relationships and trends in such data. 

In the past few decades, this situation has changed. Temporal-spatial data are gaining in importance. Periodic earth observations – in particular – provide a wealth of data, to such an extent that these data are not even fully exploited yet. However, new methods and techniques to extract useful information from rich data have been developed, and are still being investigated. Data mining, KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases), scientific visualization in general and geovisualization in particular (see Chapter 2) can all be viewed in this light.  

An important application dealing with spatial dynamics is monitoring. Monitoring is, for example, an integral part of many sustainable development, disaster prevention, early warning and emergency response programmes. Spatial dynamics results from changes in the characteristics of spatial phenomena over time (see Chapter 3). Therefore, no matter to what domain monitoring is applied, its aim is always to keep track of the various changes in the phenomena under investigation through exploration and analysis of the data. These activities yield information about changes needed to discover patterns, relationships and trends, which in turn can be used to warn of /interfere in possibly undesired developments, to model the dynamics, or to extrapolate them to the future. 

Although specialists in monitoring make use of (static) maps and images, they rely heavily on computational methods to reveal information about changes reflected in spatio-temporal data sets. The human ability to quickly ‘see’ shapes, patterns, relationships, trends and movement, however, is very powerful. Therefore, additional ......