Showing posts with label Spatial Thinking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spatial Thinking. Show all posts

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Spatial Thinking


Spatial thinking, one form of thinking, is a collection of cognitive skills. The skills consist of declarative and perceptual forms of knowledge and some cognitive operations that can be used to transform, combine, or otherwise operate on this knowledge. The key to spatial thinking is a constructive amalgam of three elements: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning. It is the concept of space that makes spatial thinking a distinctive form of thinking. By understanding the meanings of space, we can use its properties (e.g., dimensionality, continuity, proximity, separation) as a vehicle for structuring problems, finding answers, and expressing and communicating solutions..
(Learn to Think Spatially. National Academies Press. USA, 2006 accessed thru https://www.nap.edu/read/11019/chapter/6)

To think spatially entails knowing about (1) space—for example, the relationships among units of measurement (e.g., kilometers versus miles), different ways of calculating distance (e.g., miles, travel time, travel cost), the basis of coordinate systems (e.g., Cartesian versus polar coordinates), the nature of spaces (e.g., number of dimensions [two- versus three-dimensional]); (2) representation—for example, the relationships among views (e.g., plans versus elevations of buildings, or orthogonal versus perspective maps), the effect of projections (e.g., Mercator versus equal-area map projections), the principles of graphic design (e.g., the roles of legibility, visual contrast, and figure-ground organization in the readability of graphs and maps); and (3) reasoning—for example,Bottom of Form the different ways of thinking about shortest distances (e.g., as the crow flies versus route distance in a rectangular street grid), the ability to extrapolate and interpolate (e.g., projecting a functional relationship on a graph into the future or estimating the slope of a hillside from a map of contour lines), and making decisions (e.g., given traffic reports on a radio, selecting an alternative detour).
(Learn to Think Spatially. National Academies Press. USA accessed thru https://www.nap.edu/read/11019/chapter/6)


 A spatial datum comprises a triple of measurements. One or more attributes (X) are measured at a set of locations (i) at time t, where t may be a point or interval of time. So, if k attributes are measured at n locations at time t, we can present the spatial data in

the form: {xj (i; t) ; j = 1, . . ., k; i = 1, . . ., n}. (2.1)

(Haining, R. 2009. The Special Nature of Spatial Data (Chapter 2). Spatial Analysis (Handbook). Ed. A.S. Foteringham and P.A. Rogerson. Sage Publications. 5 pp.)


          It should be noted that spatial data is at the heart of every GIS application. Spatial data stores the geographic location of particular features, along with information describing what these features represent. The location is usually specified according to some geographic referencing system (e.g. latitude, longitude) or simply by an address. Spatial data may define some physical characteristics, such as location or position, or it may also define a property such as the area of a forest (which results from defining the various positions of its boundaries). (Davies, 1996).

(Fundamentals of GIS Data, Chapter 2, p.1 accessed at http://igre.emich.edu/wsatraining/TManual/Chapter2/Chap2.pdf)

  I attended the Intensive Course in Environmental Planning (ICEP) last February 12-16, 2024 conducted by the Planning and Research Foundati...