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 autocorrelation"

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 sampling

The geographic world may be sampled rather than described completely; the methods (e.g., random, systematic, stratified) will impact the results of analysis. "One of the implications of Tobler's First Law and spatial dependence is that it is possible to capture a reasonably accurate description of the Earth's surface with a few well-placed samples. Meteorologists capture weather patterns by sampling at measuring stations, knowing that conditions between these sample locations will vary systematically and smoothly.

Geography

de Smith, et al. (2008)

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