The fractal nature of maps and mapping

Jiang, Bin

doi:10.1080/13658816.2014.953165

Cited by 32 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…We therefore believe that geodesign should be considered as the wholeness-extending transformations, or something like the unfolding processes of seeds or embryos (Alexander 2002(Alexander -2005 towards a high degree of wholeness (see a further discussion in Section 5). This idea of unfolding applies to map design as well, since maps are essentially fractal and possess the same kind of beauty (Jiang 2015c). This is in line with what we have discussed at the beginning of this paper that design should be part of complexity science.…”

Section: Voidsupporting

confidence: 78%

Wholeness as a hierarchical graph to capture the nature of space

Jiang

2015

International Journal of Geographical Information Science

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According to Christopher Alexander's theory of centers, a whole comprises numerous, recursively defined centers for things or spaces surrounding us. Wholeness is a type of global structure or life-giving order emerging from the whole as a field of the centers. The wholeness is an essential part of any complex system and exists, to some degree or other, in spaces. This paper defines wholeness as a hierarchical graph, in which individual centers are represented as the nodes and their relationships as the directed links. The hierarchical graph gets its name from the inherent scaling hierarchy revealed by the head/tail breaks, which is a classification scheme and visualization tool for data with a heavy-tailed distribution. We suggest that (1) the degrees of wholeness for individual centers should be measured by PageRank (PR) scores based on the notion that high-degree-of-life centers are those to which many high-degree-of-life centers point, and (2) that the hierarchical levels, or the ht-index of the PR scores induced by the head/tail breaks can characterize the degree of wholeness for the whole: the higher the ht-index, the more life or wholeness in the whole. Three case studies applied to the Alhambra building complex and the street networks of Manhattan and Sweden illustrate that the defined wholeness captures fairly well human intuitions on the degree of life for the geographic spaces. We further suggest that the mathematical model of wholeness be an important model of geographic representation, because it is topological oriented that enables us to see the underlying scaling structure. The model can guide geodesign, which should be considered as the wholeness-extending transformations that are essentially like the unfolding processes of seeds or embryos, for creating beautiful built and natural environments or with a high degree of wholeness.

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Section: Voidsupporting

confidence: 78%

Wholeness as a hierarchical graph to capture the nature of space

Jiang

2015

International Journal of Geographical Information Science

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“…In the big data era, cartography faces the same challenge of how to efficiently and effectively visualize the large amounts of crowdsourcing geographic information, and nighttime images. I believe that recognition of the fractal nature of maps and mapping (Jiang 2014) offers a way to meet the challenge.…”

Section: Head/tail Breaks Leading To a New Definition Of Fractalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Head/tail breaks for visualization of city structure and dynamics

Jiang

2015

Cities

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The things surrounding us vary dramatically, which implies that there are far more small things than large ones, e.g., far more small cities than large ones in the world. This dramatic variation is often referred to as fractal or scaling. To better reveal the fractal or scaling structure, a new classification scheme, namely head/tail breaks, has been developed to recursively derive different classes or hierarchical levels. The head/tail breaks works as such: divide things into a few large ones in the head (those above the average) and many small ones (those below the average) in the tail, and recursively continue the dividing process for the large ones (or the head) until the notion of far more small things than large ones has been violated. This paper attempts to argue that head/tail breaks can be a powerful visualization tool for illustrating structure and dynamics of natural cities. Natural cities refer to naturally or objectively defined human settlements based on a meaningful cutoff averaged from a massive amount of units extracted from geographic information. To illustrate the effectiveness of head/tail breaks in visualization, I have developed several case studies applied to natural cities derived from the points of interest, social media location data, and time series nighttime images. I further elaborate on head/tail breaks related to fractals, beauty, and big data.

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“…In the big data era, cartography faces the same challenge of how to efficiently and effectively visualize the large amounts of crowdsourcing geographic information. I believe that recognition of the fractal nature of maps and mapping (Jiang 2015c) offers a way to meet the challenge.…”

Section: Further Discussion On Head/tail Breaksmentioning

confidence: 99%

European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information

2016

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Part II: Quality: Criteria and methodologiesChapter 5. Handling quality in crowdsourced geographic information (Laura Criscuolo, Paola Carrara, Gloria Bordogna, Monica Pepe, Francesco Zucca, Roberto Seppi, Alessandro Oggioni and Anna Rampini) 57Chapter 6. Data quality in crowdsourcing for biodiversity research: issues and examples (Clemens Jacobs) 75Chapter 7. Semantic Challenges for Volunteered Geographic Information (Andrea Ballatore) 87Chapter 8. Quality analysis of the Parisian OSM toponyms evolution (Vyron Antoniou, Guillaume Touya and Ana-Maria Raimond) 97Chapter 9. Tackling the thematic accuracy of areal features in OpenStreetMap (Ahmed Loai Ali) 113iv European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic InformationFive years later, in 2012, the ENERGIC action started exploring new VGI sources, sharing and developing data retrieval software, assessing VGI quality, defining standardization criteria for interoperability with other datasets, identifying applications and transferring them for business implementation (market analysis, risk management, advertising, etc. 1 ).The action is based on the study of the remarkable new source of geographic information that has become available in the form of user-generated content accessible over the Internet. People now consume and produce geographic information on the go via platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram and others. The availability of cheap GPS allows everyone to survey and map and contribute to projects like Wikimapia and OpenStreetMap. The exploitation, integration and application of these sources, termed crowdsourced or user generated information, offer to multidisciplinary scientists an unprecedented opportunity to conduct research on a variety of topics at multiple scales.The most popular definition of such content that possesses a geographic reference data is Volunteered Geographic Information ( The growing volume of scientific production on the topic cover multiple domains but some major threads may be identified, although intertwined and often coexisting, to build a narrative on the development of VGI. After an initial phase concerned mostly with conceptualizing and defining the new phenomenon (Coleman 2010; Elwood,2008; Capineri & Rondinone 2011;See et al. 2016;Sui et al. 2012) In conclusion, a very wide panorama which proves the broad penetration of VGI in the scientific community and the diverse research paths.The collection of the papers in this book touch on many of these threads. The Book StructureThe book includes peer-reviewed chapters, organised in six parts, which try to address some PART I: Theoretical and social aspectsPart I deals with the nature and features of crowdsourced geographic information: the different sources and typologies of VGI, the fundamental aspect of participation. Capineri (Chapter 2) discusses the main features of crowdsourced geographic information by focusing on the components of such data: the geographical reference, the contents and the producers' profile in order to show the potentialities and crit...

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The fractal nature of maps and mapping

Cited by 32 publications

References 26 publications

Wholeness as a hierarchical graph to capture the nature of space

Wholeness as a hierarchical graph to capture the nature of space

Head/tail breaks for visualization of city structure and dynamics

European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information

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