We are on the verge of what many are calling the "second information revolution," based on ubiquitous access to both computing and information. The technologies of instant access have potential to transform dramatically our lives. This book contains chapters by leading international experts. They discuss issues surrounding the impact of instant access on cities, daily lives, transportation, privacy, social and economic networks, community and education.

The Definitive Volume on Cutting-Edge Exploratory Analysis of Massive Spatial and Spatiotemporal Databases

Since the publication of the first edition of Geographic Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, new techniques for geographic data warehousing (GDW), spatial data mining, and geovisualization (GVis) have been developed. In addition, there has been a rise in the use of knowledge discovery techniques due to the increasing collection and storage of data on spatiotemporal processes and mobile objects. Incorporating these novel developments, this second edition reflects the current state of the art in the field.

New to the Second Edition

• Updated material on geographic knowledge discovery (GKD), GDW research, map cubes, spatial dependency, spatial clustering methods, clustering techniques for trajectory data, the INGENS 2.0 software, and GVis techniques
• New chapter on data quality issues in GKD
• New chapter that presents a tree-based partition querying methodology for medoid computation in large spatial databases
• New chapter that discusses the use of geographically weighted regression as an exploratory technique
• New chapter that gives an integrated approach to multivariate analysis and geovisualization
• Five new chapters on knowledge discovery from spatiotemporal and mobile objects databases

Geographic data mining and knowledge discovery is a promising young discipline with many challenging research problems. This book shows that this area represents an important direction in the development of a new generation of spatial analysis tools for data-rich environments. Exploring various problems and possible solutions, it will motivate researchers to develop new methods and applications in this emerging field.

We are on the verge of what many are calling the "second information revolution," based on ubiquitous access to both computing and information. The technologies of instant access have potential to transform dramatically our lives. This book contains chapters by leading international experts. They discuss issues surrounding the impact of instant access on cities, daily lives, transportation, privacy, social and economic networks, community and education.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Geographic Information Science, GIScience 2006. The book presents 26 revised full papers. Among traditional topics addressed are spatial representations and data structures, spatial and temporal reasoning, computational geometry, spatial analysis, and databases. Many papers deal with navigation, interoperability, dynamic modeling, ontology, and semantics. Geosensors, location privacy, social issues and GI research networks rank among the new directions covered.

This section gives a description of notions used throughout this study. Current achievements in developing action-centered ontologies are also discussed. 2.1 Ontologies In the context of information extraction and retrieval, different kinds of ontologies can be distinguished [15]: * Top-level ontologies describe very general concepts like space and time, not depending on a particular domain, * Domain ontologies and task ontologies describe the vocabulary related to a generic domain or kind of task, detailing the terms used in the top-level ontology, * Application ontologies describe the concepts that depend on the particular domain and task within a specific activity. Several investigations have been conducted to bring actions (tasks) to bear on - tologies. Among them are Chandrasekaran et al. [6] and Mizoguchi et al. [23] in the fields of AI and Knowledge Engineering. For the geospatial domain, Kuhn [21] and Raubal and Kuhn [26] have attempted to support human actions in ontologies for transportation. Acknowledging the importance of human actions in the geographic domain, a research workshop was held in 2002, bringing together experts from diff- ent disciplines to share the knowledge and work on this issue [1]. Camara [5], one of the workshop participants, has proposed that action-driven spatial ontologies are formed via category theory, for the case of emergency action plans.

GIS-T, an increasingly popular field, is the branch of GIS related to transportation. This professional reference/graduate level text presents a comprehensive and rigorous analysis of GIS-T applications in the analysis and planning of transportation systems.

The GIScience conference series was founded in 2000 with the goal of providing a forum for researchers interested in advancing the fundamental aspects of the prod- tion, dissemination, and use of geographic information. The conference is held bi- nually and attracts people from academia, industry, and government across a host of disciplines including cognitive science, computer science, engineering, geography, information science, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, social science, and stat- tics. Following a very successful conference in Münster, Germany in 2006, this year’s conference was held in Park City, Utah, USA, the prior site of the 2002 Winter Ol- pics and home to the annual Sundance Film Festival. There are two forms of submission to the conference: full papers of 6000 words or less and extended abstracts of 500-1000 words for either a presentation or poster. This format was originally designed to capture the cultural difference between researchers who prefer to publish a peer-reviewed conference paper and those who would rather submit an abstract covering work in progress. This year 77 full papers were submitted and reviewed by 3 Program Committee members, of which 24 were selected for pr- entation and inclusion in this volume. Of the 115 extended abstracts that were subm- ted and reviewed by 2 Program Committee members, 47 were accepted for an oral presentation and 25 were accepted for presentation as a poster. The abstracts were published in a second booklet and are available on the GIScience website (http://www. giscience. org).