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Temporal GISes of changing administrative boundaries: European comparisons
Ian Gregory
The advantages of using GIS to analyse census and similar data are well known. Being able to link statistical data to a polygon representation of the administrative unit that the data were published for opens up major possibilities for the visualisation and analysis of these data. Most work to date has focussed on single census snapshots, however, many countries have been publishing data of this sort for two centuries or more. One of the key potential advantages of the census and related sources, therefore, is that they contain a wealth of information about change through time as well as through space. As yet, the seemingly trivial problem of boundary changes has meant that these data have yet to be fully exploited.
GIS offers the possibility of exploiting spatio-temporal data of this type as a fully integrated resource. The first stage in doing this is to create a temporal GIS database of a country's changing administrative units. This is no small challenge: most GIS software does not include temporal functionality, researching changing boundaries can take significant archival skills, and the volume and complexity of the data often leads to a long development process. In this paper a variety of approaches to creating temporal GISes of changing administrative units within Europe are explained and evaluated. Some possible analytic approaches to using these databases are then explored.
Related URL:
International Workshop on Historical GIS
Fudan University, Shanghai, August 23-25, 2001
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