A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Conventionally geographic data produced and disseminated by the national mapping agencies are used for studying various urban issues. These data are not commonly available or accessible, but also are criticized for being expensive. However, this trend is changing along with the rise of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). VGI, known as user generated content, is the geographic data collected and disseminated by individuals at a voluntary basis. So far, a huge amount of geographic data has been collected due to the increasing number of contributors and volunteers. More importantly, they are free and accessible to anyone. There are many formats of VGI such as Wikimapia, Flickr, GeoNames and OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is a new mapping project contributed by volunteers via a wiki-like collaboration, which is aimed to create free, editable map of the entire world. This thesis adopts OSM as the main data source to uncover the hidden patterns around the urban systems. We investigated some fundamental issues such as city rank size law and the measurement of urban sprawl. These issues were conventionally studied using Census or satellite imagery data. We define the concept of natural cities in order to assess city size distribution. Natural cities are generated in a bottom up manner via the agglomeration of individual street nodes. This clustering process is dependent on one parameter called clustering resolution. Different clustering resolutions could derive different levels of natural cities. In this respect, they show little bias compared to city boundaries imposed by Census bureau or extracted from satellite imagery. Based on the investigation, we made two findings about rank size distributions. The first one is that all the natural cities in US follow strictly Zipf’s law regardless of the clustering resolutions, which is different from other studies only investigating a few largest cities. The second one is that Zipf’s law is not universal at the state level, e.g., Zipf’s law for natural cities within individual ...
Conventionally geographic data produced and disseminated by the national mapping agencies are used for studying various urban issues. These data are not commonly available or accessible, but also are criticized for being expensive. However, this trend is changing along with the rise of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). VGI, known as user generated content, is the geographic data collected and disseminated by individuals at a voluntary basis. So far, a huge amount of geographic data has been collected due to the increasing number of contributors and volunteers. More importantly, they are free and accessible to anyone. There are many formats of VGI such as Wikimapia, Flickr, GeoNames and OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is a new mapping project contributed by volunteers via a wiki-like collaboration, which is aimed to create free, editable map of the entire world. This thesis adopts OSM as the main data source to uncover the hidden patterns around the urban systems. We investigated some fundamental issues such as city rank size law and the measurement of urban sprawl. These issues were conventionally studied using Census or satellite imagery data. We define the concept of natural cities in order to assess city size distribution. Natural cities are generated in a bottom up manner via the agglomeration of individual street nodes. This clustering process is dependent on one parameter called clustering resolution. Different clustering resolutions could derive different levels of natural cities. In this respect, they show little bias compared to city boundaries imposed by Census bureau or extracted from satellite imagery. Based on the investigation, we made two findings about rank size distributions. The first one is that all the natural cities in US follow strictly Zipf’s law regardless of the clustering resolutions, which is different from other studies only investigating a few largest cities. The second one is that Zipf’s law is not universal at the state level, e.g., Zipf’s law for natural cities within individual ...
Exploring Massive Volunteered Geographic Information for Geographic Knowledge Discovery
Tao, Jia (author)
2010-01-01
2010:17
Theses
Electronic Resource
English
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