3 Spatial properties and relationships
Understanding spatial properties, relationships and how they are used within spatial operations are the building blocks to spatial data processing and analysis. This week, we look to provide you with a thorough introduction into using spatial operations (and the properties and relationships associated with them) through an introductory lecture, a research-based analysis (with demo and practical) and then a research task which we will look at during this week’s seminar.
Within the lecture, we will highlight the different ways of conceptualizing key spatial properties, such as distance, and the impact this may have on measurement. We then focus on their application within spatial operations, and how they can be used for the selection, subset and validation of data. We then look at the core terminology used to define spatial relationships and how they can be used to process datasets, using the operations previously mentioned.
The practical utilises these concepts to investigate the accessibility of greenspace for schools across London. Recent research (Bijnens et al, 2020) has shown that children brought up in proximity to greenspace have a higher IQ and fewer behavioral problems, irrespective of socio-economic background. Here we will look to understand whether there are geographical patterns to schools that have high versus low access of greenspace and where a lack of greenspace needs to be addressed.
For the practical, we provide an introduction to the research problem and outline how we devise a research methodology to be able to investigate our research questions. We then look at the required processing steps to create the final dataset that can be used in our analysis. This is followed by a short demo in which Jo will demonstrate the analysis visually in QGIS. We then ask you to recreate the analysis by creating a script in R-Studio (code provided) - this will allow you to replicate the analysis for other cities within the U.K, or even further afield if you can extract the same data. Finally, in preparation for this week’s seminar, we ask you to watch a five minute video from a local news channel in Jo’s hometown - ready to discuss as a possible research task in Friday’s seminar.