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.