4th February 2014 (11:00-12:00 - Location TBC)
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/gis/seminars
Professor Bin Jiang (University of Gävle, Sweden)
Title
Head/Tail Breaks for Visualizing the Fractal or Scaling Structure of
Geographic Features
Summary
Things surrounding us are unevenly distributed, implying that instead of
more or less similar things, there are far more small things large ones,
e.g., far more small cities than large ones in a country (Zipf 1949),
far more small city artifacts than large ones in a city (Salingaros and
West 1999, Jiang and Liu 2012). This phenomenon is often referred to as
fractal or scaling in the literature (Mandelbrot 1982, Bonner 2006). To
better visualize the fractal or scaling structure, we developed a new
classification scheme, namely head/tail breaks, which recursively
divides things (or large things) into two imbalanced parts: a minority
of large things in the head and a majority of small things in the tail
(Jiang 2013). Unlike conventional classification methods like natural
breaks (Jenks 1967), this new classification scheme helps efficiently
and effectively visualize the underlying fractal or scaling structure in
a simple and unique way. More importantly, head/tail breaks adds deep
implications to statistical mapping (Jiang 2013), map generalization
(Jiang, Liu and Jia 2013), cognitive mapping (Lynch 1960, Jiang 2013),
and perception of beauty (Alexander 2002, Jiang and Sui 2014). The
head/tail breaks derived hierarchy (or the number of the classes),
namely ht-index (Jiang and Yin 2014), can be used, as an alternative to
fractal dimension (Mandelbrot 1982), for quantifying complexity of
geographic features, or fractals in general.
All are welcome!
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Bin Jiang
Division of Geomatics, KTH Research School
Department of Technology and Built Environment
University of Gävle, SE-801 76 Gävle, Sweden
Phone: +46-26-64 8901 Fax: +46-26-64 8758
Email: [log in to unmask] Web: http://fromto.hig.se/~bjg/
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European Associate Editor
Computers, Environment and Urban Systems: An International Journal
ICA Commission: https://sites.google.com/site/commissionofica/
Geomatics Program: https://sites.google.com/site/geomaticsprogram/
Special Issue: https://sites.google.com/site/call4papersbigdata/
SENSORCITY: https://sites.google.com/site/sensorcityproject/
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