Cyberinfrastructure for Spatial Statistical Analysis

Abstract Title:
Cyberinfrastructure for Spatial Statistical Analysis

is part of the Paper Session:
Special Session to honor Manfred M Fischer's contributions to Geography: Spatial Analysis and Modeling. 1.

Friday, 4/18/08 at 14:30 PM.

Author(s):
Luc Anselin* - Arizona State University (luc.anselin@asu.edu)
Myunghwa Hwang - Arizona State University

Abstract:
Increasingly, the functionality of GIS and
spatial analysis is available over the internet, in the form of various
web services. To date, these are primarily geared at delivering data,
providing mapping functionality and supporting basic spatial queries.
In this paper, we build on earlier work developing spatial data
analytical software (GeoDa and PySal) and describe our efforts towards
moving this functionality to the geospatial semantic web. We outline
the conceptual framework, describe the overall architecture and
illustrate a prototype implementation of spatial data analytical web
services. A major distinction between our current software and the web
services is that these services are intended for automatic discovery by
other services and not primarily targeted at human users. This requires
the development of appropriate geospatial processing ontologies to
facilitate the discovery and properly describe the data requirements,
assumptions and computational functionality of the analytical services.
We illustrate our conceptual framework with an example that delivers
maps of smoothed disease rates by combining distributed web services
dealing with data provision, mapping and rate calculation.

Keywords:
spatial analysis, semantic web, spatial statistics, GIServices