Yongmei Lu
Ge Lin
Recent advances in telecommunication and information technology have greatly enhanced our way of accessing and working with spatial related information. Being a high-speed and world-wide information network, Internet has fundamentally changed our ways of spatial interactions and information transformations. Yet recent surveys show that rapid development of the Internet has also caused problems of inequality in accessing information. (See the results of User Survey of WWW at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/.) Those who can access and be able process information timely will be empowered with tremendous advantages over those who lack the access ( Armstrong, B. 1995; Shostak, 1996). This, according to Castells (1989) will inevitably lead to polarization and re-segmentation of information society, which in his own terms is the rise of dual city. In fact, the polarization is far more popular and significant than what Castells realized in 1989. Different accessibility to information, in our view, will likely result in differentiation of new social strata. The root of this re-segmentation, however, is along the dimension of information, which is far beyond the traditional view of social segmentation (e.g., by income, employment, ethnic group etc.).
This new form of polarization, which is also one of the topics of this research conference, has already been noticed by many scholars. To us, the polarization consists of two distinctive segments of population: on one hand, there exists a group of people who can keeping track of information development and is frequent visitors to or live in cyber-city (society) (Batty, 1995; Mitchell, 1995; Also see following addresses-- http://www.unet.com/manchester/, http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/virt-town/town-graphic.html); And on the other end of the spectrum, people, who either are afraid of or have difficulties in accessing information, are left out, while still keep the traditional lives of industrial society (Armstrong,M. 1995). These two groups, of course, will intersect with other social strata defined in traditional ways.
There are, perhaps, two reasons causing this dual-structure. One is attributable to the level of physical access to digital information. Those who cannot afford a computer and do not have access to a computer certainly cannot process any digital information. The other is attributable to the inertia of traditional life. Those who have the access but do not want to use it, or fear to use it will also be left behind. This group of people are usually those of aging, female, high schools students etc. who are laymen about information technology and reluctant to access information. And this is the group of people for whom we intend to improve their accessibility with specific reference to geographic information.
The inertia of traditional life is particularly a problem for accessing geographic information, not only because of the complexity of finding information (combinations of graphic and textual information), but also because of inability in processing geographic information on-line. In this paper, we address this issue while developing some GIS tools over the Internet. These tools will help to enhance general users' ability of getting and processing geographic information, thus reduce the second cause of the dual-structure of information city.
GIS is one of most powerful tools dealing with spatial information. However, its usage over the Internet is limited to querying and acquiring geo-referenced data or images. To our knowledge, no GIS tool is available for processing geographic information on the World Wide Web(WWW), a multimedia-based method of integrating information on the Internet. There are two distinct problems associated with processing geographic information on the Internet. One is the accessibility of information to a GIS package, and the other is users' accessibility to GIS functions or tools on-line (on the Internet). Although these two issues are interrelated, they follow quite different strategies in processing geographic information. To link on-line spatial data to a GIS package, one would either improve his own GIS packages compatibility to other data forms or to integrate other forms of data into the package. The former is similar to what is now the industrial buzzword of OGIS or open GIS (Kevanny, 1995). The latter falls under data integration into a GIS environment. To process geographic information on-line, the data model and tools must be platform free, and be able to apply GIS tools to the readily available geographic information. In this study, we limited our work to on-line geographic information processing. Our approach is similar in spirit to one of the goals of open GIS: an end user does not have to know GIS, but the process may relate to a GIS model. Thus, people will never get into a GIS package but still be able to perform GIS or other spatial modeling. A set of tools is a side bar while accessing geographic information on the Internet. An end user may have no knowledge of GIS or might have refused to use GIS as a package, but he or she may be delighted to use one of these tools to solve his or her own spatial problem.
To implement this strategy on the Internet, we use JAVA, a flexible and powerful computer language designed for programming on the Internet. First, we develop stand alone prototypes of GIS tools on the World Wide Web (see http://www.geog.buffalo.edu/ ~gelin/GeoView for an example). Then, we demonstrate how to apply these tools on the Internet. Besides enhancing generalaccessibility to geographic information on the Internet, there are several potential applications of these tools. For instance, GIS tools on Internet will help to expand GIS education to students in community colleges and high schools, where up-scale computer hardware and software are often not available.
Reference:
Armstrong, Ben 1995, The Social Impact of a National Information Superhighway, Computers and Society, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 10-14
Armstrong, Marc P. 1995, GIS and Group Decision-Making: A Look at the Dark Side, GIS/LIS 1995, pp. 11-19
Batty, Michael 1995, The Computable city, (Paper submitted to the Fourth International Conference in Urban Planning and Urban Management, Melbourne, Australia, July, 1995)
Castells, Manuel 1989, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and The Urban-regional Process Oxford, UK; New York, NY, USA; B. Blackwell
Kevanny, Michael J. et al 1995, Opportunity and Challenges: A Community Approach to Open Systems Geo Info Systems. vol. 5, Number 11, pp. 16-30
Mitchell, W. J. 1995, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Inforbahm. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Shostak, Inna 1996, Computer and Employment, Computer and Society, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 21-23
Brief Resume
Name: Yongmei Lu Address: Yonglu@geog.buffalo.edu
Education:
August, 1995 -- present: Ph. D. student , Department of Geography and
NCGIA
at SUNY, Buffalo
MS July, 1994: Geography Department, Peking University,
Beijing, China
BS July, 1991: Geography Department, Peking University,
Beijing, China
Research Interests:
GIS and GIS application in Urban and Regional Studies
Informational Revolution and its implications on urban development
High-tech Industrial Development and Its Influence on Planning
Ge Lin
Gelin@geog.buffalo.edu