AUTOMATING VISUALIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF LIFELINES IN A GIS ENVIRONMENT

F.J. Escobar, D. Sarazoglu, B. Sanchez

University of Alcala

francisco.escobar@uah.es

 

The paradigm of Time Geography (TG) mainly focuses on daily human activities. It was firstly developed by Torsten Hägerstrand in the 70s (Hägerstrand, 1970). Human activities like working, learning, shopping, etc. all take place in specialized places that leads to a fundamental human activity: displacement (Hägerstrand, 1970; Bosque et al, 1992; McBride et al, 2002). The analysis of these individual activities in a contextual approach is the main purpose of TG.

TG possesses its own graphic language, which is simple, flexible and easy to understand. This language is based on a spatio-temporal region with two horizontal axes representing the space while a third vertical one represents time. This language makes TG independent from spatial and temporal scales as it allows for analysis of short or long time duration phenomena as well as analysis of phenomena that occur in small or large regions.

TG and GIS had developed a scarce relationship. There are two main reasons of this:

-          While TG was more active in 70s and 80s, GIS was an immature technology, (Coppock and Rhind, 1991);

-          GIS was focused on firstly quantitative geography paradigm or spatial perspective and the incorporation of other dimensions are very recent (Löytönen, 1998).

The researches on the integration of TG with GIS focus on three data models: raster models (Mark et al, 2001; Huisman and Forer 1998), vector models (Miller 1999; Kwan 2000; Salado 2001; McBride et al, 2002) and Object Oriented data models (Wachowicz 1999; Makin et al, 1992). Using these models significant contributions have been done to TG and GIS integration. However, a full integration of TG with GIS is not yet fully achieved. Furthermore, the static nature of GIS is not developed enough as to display dynamic phenomenon such as the ones concerned by TG. However, although Multimedia (MM) can provide display capacity, it lacks analyzing capacity of GIS.

This paper shows attempts at integrating the graphic power of MM with analytical power of GIS in order to display and to analyze TG data. An application that is embedded in a standard GIS package using MM display capability can be a solution to this problem.

As a case study, issues related to the conciliation of family and labour life in Basque Country is undertaken. The main reason for this selection is to take advantage of work currently carried out by staff of the Department of Geography in collaboration with Farapi SL (a consultancy company on applied anthropological studies). In order to increase the life quality of workers of a given factory and to facilitate family-labour life conciliation, an analysis of daily life activities and obligations by means of time and space was carried out in conjunction with factory schedule and public transportation and child care scenarios.