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In recent years the development of spatial referencing techniques in com puter-based information systems has enormously increased the opportuni ties that exist for the treatment and presentation of both point and interaction data. The extent of this increase has drawn attention to the need for special aggregation and clustering procedures to be developed which enable data to be grouped in an efficient way for analytical pur poses with a minimum loss of detail. In the case of interaction data, economy of representation is particularly important as the analysis is further complicated by the two-way directionality that is inherent in each data set. Procedural rules of this kind are needed not only for descriptive analy sis and spatial accounting but also for hypothesis testing and the develop ment of operational models of spatial interaction. Yet the importance of spatial representation in this kind of research has only recently been fully understood. The first generation of urban development models that were developed in Europe and North America during the 1960's often treated matters of zoning system specification very casually, even though in some cases this imposed severe limits on the interpretation of their findings and it was not until the Centre for Environmental Studies/Cheshire project (Barras et al. , 1971) that a serious attempt was made to put forward general principles which could be used as guidelines in future work.
List of contents
1. Spatial representation and spatial interaction: an overview.- 1.1. Introduction.- 1.2. The multi-criteria aggregation problem.- 1.3. The multi-level specification problem.- I: Multi-Criteria Aggregation Problems.- 2. Sequential treatment of the multi-criteria aggregation problem: a case study of zoning system design.- 3. An empirical investigation of the use of Broadbent's rule in spatial system design.- 4. A simplistic approach to the redistricting problem.- 5. An optimal zoning approach to the study of spatially aggregated data.- 6. Speculations on an information theoretic approach to spatial representation.- II: Multi-Level Specification Problems.- 7. The specification of multi-level systems for spatial analysis.- 8. Hierarchical trip distribution models and the design of accounting systems.- 9. Some suggestions for future research.- References.
