Spatial Concept Perspectives

We have gathered ~300 excerpts from published works about fundamental spatial concept terms. These have been cross-referenced with the concept lexicon appearing on the left. Those terms were drawn from the U.S.National Science Education Standards (NSES 1996) for topic areas B - Physical Science, C - Life Science, D - Earth and Space Science, as well as from the 1994 U.S. Geography Teaching Standards for grades 9-12. Those standards can be browsed here.

spatial concept terms

disciplinary perspectives on "spatial association"

areal association

Measure degree of similarity between point, line, or area distributions (p. 698)

Geography

Marsh, et al. (2008)

Geospatial Concept Understanding and Recognition in G6-College Students: A Preliminary Argument for Minimal GIS

association

A spatial association is a pair of features that tend to occur together in the same locations, like squirrels and oak trees or coral reefs and tropical islands (p. 287, see source for more)

Geography

Gersmehl and Gersmehl (2007)

Spatial thinking by young children. Neurologic evidence for early development and "educability"

association

[OED]: 7. a. The mental connexion between an object and ideas that have some relation to it (e.g. of similarity, contrariety, contiguity, causation).

Linguistics

OED Online (2nd Ed.)

Oxford English Dictionary, Online Edition

correlation

[OED]: 1. c. In Statistics, an interdependence of two or more variable quantities such that a change in the value of one is associated with a change in the value or the expectation of the others.

Linguistics

OED Online (2nd Ed.)

Oxford English Dictionary, Online Edition

spatial dependence

Attributes of places that are near to each other tend to be more similar than attributes of places that are far apart (Tobler's First Law, clusters, formal regions, measures of spatial dependence, distance decay, spatial lags, and autoregressive processes). "...anyone examining the Earth's surface in detail would be struck by how conditions tend to persist locally, and how it is possible to divide the surface into regions that exhibit substantial internal similarity.

Geography

de Smith, et al. (2008)

Geospatial Analysis: A comprehensive guide to principles, techniques, and software tools

spatial dependence

Understanding relationships across space. Attributes of places that are near to each other tend to be more similar than attributes of places that are far apart (Tobler's First Law). The identification of spatial clusters, formal regions, distance-decay and spatial-lag effects, and autoregressive processes all display properties of spatial dependence.

Social Science

Janelle and Goodchild (2011)

Concepts, Principles, Tools, and Challenges in Spatially Integrated Social Science

spatial model

Statement about influences across great distances (p. 110); Theory about how conditions in one place can affect conditions in another place, often quite far away (p. 274)

Geography

Gersmehl (2005)

Teaching geography

spatial probability

The likelihood of something happening at a place, presented, e.g., as probability fields, species range maps, trade area estimation, and risk maps. "Humans will never have a complete understanding of everything that happens on the Earth's surface, and so it is often convenient to resort to thinking in terms of probabilities. In principle one could completely characterise the physics of a human hand and a coin, but in practice it is much more productive to assign probabilities to the outcomes of a coin toss.

Geography

de Smith, et al. (2008)

Geospatial Analysis: A comprehensive guide to principles, techniques, and software tools