Representing Datum-level Uncertainty in Historical GIS

Author: Plewe, Brandon S.

Source: Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Volume 30, Number 4, October 2003 , pp. 319-334(16)

Publisher: Cartography and Geographic Information Society

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Cartography and Geographic Information Science (CaGIS) is the official publication of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS), a member organization of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM). The Cartography and Geographic Information Society supports research, education, and practices that improve the understanding, creation, analysis, and use of maps and geographic information. The society serves as a forum for the exchange of original concepts, techniques, approaches, and experiences by those who design, implement, and use geospatial technologies through the publication of authoritative articles and international papers. The role of the CaGIS journal is to facilitate these objectives by disseminating results and reports in these areas of interest.

In 2004, CaGIS became one of the three official journals of the International Cartographic Association (ICA). This distinction has allowed the Journal to expand its reach worldwide, with the benefits of including international submissions and inviting international participation in the editorial and review process of submissions to the International Cartographic Conference.
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Abstract:

Geographic information systems have great potential as a tool for studying and teaching historical geography. However, using traditional GIS data models, even spatio-temporal forms, has been difficult due to the prevalence of uncertainty—both ambiguity and fuzziness—in source information concerning space, time, and theme. Explicitly uncertain assertions of a geo-historical datum can be modeled as an Evidentiary Set, a hybrid of a fuzzy set with probability and Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. This set formalism is designed to represent continuous and discrete value ambiguity (e.g., "about 10"), and fuzzy membership (e.g., "somewhat Central European"), including ambiguous membership and other fuzzy-ambiguous combinations. The formal set structure can be stored in GIS by representing continuous variation with a patch model, producing logical models for object-oriented and relational GIS databases. The relational implementation was tested in two GIS databases focused on human historical geography, showing the potential for the model to represent datum-level uncertainty in a wide variety of GIS applications.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1559/152304003322606229