Container shipping gives a rise of international trade since the 1960s. Based on navigation data start from the mid-1990s to 2016, this paper empirically analyses the spatial pattern of China's international maritime linkages along the "twenty-first-century Maritime Silk Road". We interpret such evolutionary dynamics in terms of growth, hierarchical diffusion and networking phases. Networking is a new stage of the evolution of the port system, which is approached based on the graph theory, complex network methods and geomatics, the paper discusses the networking's basic characteristics: multi-hub spatial agglomeration, the connection of the network develops across space, functional differentiation and a division of labour appear among ports. Our results show that, while the scope of China's maritime linkages had expanded overtime, more foreign ports become connected to the "Maritime Silk Road". In addition, the external linkages of domestic ports tend to be dispersed, reflecting upon the decline of Pearl River Delta ports and the rise of Yangtze River Delta ports, with mixed evidence for the Bohai Rim region. Lastly, the analysis underlines the emergence of a polycentric shipping system, from the Hong Kong dominance to the more diversified Shanghai/Ningbo/Shenzhen configuration. Academic and managerial implications are included.

This article tackles the longstanding issue of intermodality head on. From a geomatics perspective, we model both maritime and road networks connecting port and non-port cities taking into account crucial features such as physical geography, shortest paths, and transport costs. This creates the opportunity to study a hybrid network -both planar and non-planar, and the centrality/accessibility of cities in this bilayered network. Based on the case of Australia, main results convey new empirical findings on how port and urban hierarchies correlate with single-layered and bi-layered connectivity. We discuss main results in the light of network science, spatial science, and transport studies.

Despite the crucial importance of maritime transport for world trade and economic development, dedicated tools to map the evolution of vessel movements remain lacking.Such movements, especially those recorded by the maritime insurance company Lloyd's List, represent the only available information documenting the changing spatial distribution of the world's shipping routes in the last century or so. This chapter tackles the lacuna head on by discussing how this particular type of shipping data can be accurately represented on a map (see Chapter 1 for a review of the field). Such an exercise poses specific issues in terms of geovisualization, as it necessitates, among other developments, the creation of a virtual maritime grid to which port nodes and their mutual vessel flows are assigned. Beyond geomatics, this research is also an opportunity to shed new light on a vibrant research question in maritime history, namely how steam has replaced sail shipping in space and time.We extracted snapshots of global maritime flows every five years from the Lloyd's Shipping Index between 1890 and 1925 in order to test the capacity of the geoportal to visualize such flows, and at the same time verify the spatio-temporal evolution of a bi-layered maritime network. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: the next section discusses the scarcity of maritime data cartography until recent years in the light of general knowledge on flow mapping in geography and elsewhere. It is followed by a description of how vessel movement data had been incorporated into a dedicated visualization system. Lastly, it provides the first-ever cartographies of such movements while discussing the gaps between our results and the existing literature on the transition from sail to steam shipping.Conclusions point to a number of ways how the visualization system may be improved in the future, and how it can contribute toward addressing numerous other issues in global transport studies in general.

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RESUME. Cet article propose une méthodologie destinée à transformer une description de position exprimée dans un référentiel indirect en une position absolue dans un référentiel direct. Cette problématique nécessite une formalisation des éléments de localisation relatifs, ici sous la forme d'un modèle en triplets, utilisé ensuite comme base de référencement, et un questionnement sur la prise en compte de l'imperfection du langage naturel dans le processus de modélisation. Nous proposons de faire appel aux objets spatiaux flous et nous comparerons leurs implémentations afin d'identifier l'approche la plus adaptée au contexte du secours en montagne.ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a methodology for transforming a position description expressed relatively in an indirect spatial reference system into an absolute position in a direct spatial reference system. This problem requires (1) to formalize the relative location elements, here in the form of a triplet model, which is used as a basis for the transformation from relative to absolute position, and (2) to investigate how the imperfection of the natural language can be taken into account in the modeling process. We propose to use fuzzy spatial objects and we will compare their implementations to identify the most appropriate approach to our context. MOTS-CLES : Référentiel spatial indirect, logique floue, objets spatiaux vagues, relation spatiale étendue, secours en montagne