Este trabalho apresenta um sistema de informações geográficas (SIG) como ferramenta de analise da reconfiguração de redes de distribuição de energia elétrica, juntamente com a evolução e tendências para os sistemas SIG. É utilizado um banco de dados relacional para armazenar dados geográficos e não geográficos e resultados de cálculo de fluxo de potência. A região em estudo é visualizada em forma de mapa sobrepondo a rede primária e os seus elementos elétricos. A simulação do novo estado da rede é feita, intuitivamente com o mouse, a partir dos elementos gráficos. O aplicativo apresenta graficamente os resultados de simulações de manobras na rede de distribuição e os valores resultantes do fluxo de potência para suas principais grandezas elétricas. / This work describes the implementation of a Geographical Information System (GIS) based reconfiguration system, aimed at primary distribution feeders (13.8 kV), together with an overview on the evolution and future trends of GIS applications. A relational database stores both spatial and non-spatial data, which are shown on the screen as a map on top of which all elements of the electrical system are displayed. An intuitive user interface, through the use of the mouse and graphical resources, allows the state of protective/switching devices to be easily changed (from closed to open and vice-versa). A load-flow routine can be executed at any time, allowing the evaluation of the impact of a particular operation. Simulation results are presented in two forms: graphical data shown directly on the screen and alphanumeric reports for later analysis.

O uso dos SIG - Sistemas de Informações Geográficas, no gerenciamento de bens patrimoniais já é uma atividade consolidada, em especial no setor de infraestrutura (saneamento, telecomunicações, eletricidade, transporte), onde os bens são distribuídos ao longo de grandes extensões territoriais. A utilização dos SIG no gerenciamento predial, apesar de ser uma pratica mais recente, vem se desenvolvendo nos últimos anos. Existem alguns casos onde a administração destes dois segmentos - o predial e o patrimonial - estão sob a responsabilidade de um mesmo gestor. A bibliografia o tema é escassa, assim como o relato de experiências práticas. Este trabalho busca estudar a utilização das técnicas de gestão patrimonial e predial baseadas em SIG, especialmente quando integradas, e sua verificação prática no caso de um campus universitário. / The use of GIS - Geographic Information Systems, in asset management is widespread, especially in the infrastructure sector (utilities and transportation), in which assets are distributed along broad territories. The use of GIS in facility management, although a more recent practice, has been evolving in the last years. There are some cases where, management of, both the infrastructure and the facilities, is the responsibility of a single organization. Literature on the subject is scant, as well as reports on practical experience. This work aims to study the use o GIS in infrastructure and facilities management, especially when integrated, and to verify it, in practice, in the case of a university campus.

Os sistemas de Informações Geográficas foram desenvolvidos com os avanços das Ciências da Computação, com base nos conceitos das Ciências Geodésicas, para serem aplicados em áreas onde os dados espaciais são utilizados. Procura-se obter uma otimização desta tecnologia, possibilitando o desenvolvimento de sistemas aplicativos interativos. Abordam-se conceitos relativos a modelagem de dados espaciais. Analisam-se a aplicação no mundo real e no modelo conceitual decorrentes. Formula-se um modelo físico com base na Emergência Médica, obtendo-se um sistema que integra programas de saúde para localização de pacientes. / The Geographic Information Systems has been developed based on the progress of the computer sciences, using concepts of the geodesic sciences, to by applied where spatial data are need. This technology is optimized and interactive systems are made. Concepts relative to spatial data modeling are discussed. The application on the real world and the conceptual model is analyzed. The physical model is formulated based on the medical emergency, to obtain a system that integrates health programs to find patients.

Moving away from the highly regionalised and constrained purely humanistic and empirical studies of hillfort location and morphology, this study is a multi-regional GIS-based analysis of the form and siting of several groups of hillforts across Britain. Hillforts in Dartmoor, Aberdeenshire, The Gower and Warminster are assessed, four regions that are topographically diverse. The highly varied topography of these regions also tests the GIS-basis of this study, another important intrinsic aspect of this novel research. GIS-based analysis has never before been applied to a study of hillfort location and morphology to this degree and, as with any innovative methodology its worth has to be tested and assessed. The thesis demonstrates that GIS-based analysis, when combined with field visits, provides a fundamental insight into the possible influences of hillfort location and morphology, which fieldwork alone will never be able to do. The GIS-based analysis developed here focuses largely upon examining degrees of movement and visibility. Unlike other GIS-based analyses of movement and visibility this integrates the two to examine visual pathways across landscapes to further investigate the visual qualities of hillforts within the various test areas. The study demonstrates that GIS-based analysis when combined with fieldwork can be affectively applied to qualitative based questions surrounding hillfort location and morphology. The overall results of this analysis had some relatively predictable results whilst there were some very surprising cases. A large number of entrances were placed within the most accessible area, however in the case of Battlesbury there was evidence for the complete disregard to accessibility within the orientation of its northwestern entrance. There were also numerous examples of the placement of a site's most prominent morphological components in correlation with the blind pathways. In these cases sites were orientated to encourage an element of surprise upon the approaching travellers.

Research Report submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Master of Science (Geographical Information Systems and Remote Sensing) School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. August 2016. / The thematic classification of land use and land cover (LULC) from remotely sensed imagery data is one of the most common research branches of applied remote sensing sciences. The performances of the pixel-based image analysis (PBIA) and object-based image analysis (OBIA) Support Vector Machine (SVM) learning algorithms were subjected to comparative assessment using WorldView-2 and SPOT-6 multispectral images of the Mokhotlong District in Lesotho covering approximately an area of 100 km2. For this purpose, four LULC classification models were developed using the combination of SVM –based image analysis approach (i.e. OBIA and/or PBIA) on high resolution images (WorldView-2 and/or SPOT-6) and the results were subjected to comparisons with one another. Of the four LULC models, the OBIA and WorldView-2 model (overall accuracy 93.2%) was found to be more appropriate and reliable for remote sensing application purposes in this environment. The OBIA-WorldView-2 LULC model was subjected to spatial overlay analysis with DEM derived topographic variables in order to evaluate the relationship between the spatial distribution of LULC types and topography, particularly for topographically-controlled patterns. It was discovered that although that there are traces of the relationship between the LULC types distributions and topography, it was significantly convoluted due to both natural and anthropogenic forces such that the topographic-induced patterns for most of the LULC types had been substantial disrupted. / LG2017

O presente trabalho avaliou a perda de solo em quatro diferentes cenários da microbacia hidrográfica do ceveiro com o auxilio da USLE: uso de 1995, uso atual (2010), uso conforme a legislação vigente e o uso conforme o PL 1.876/99. Para tanto foi utilizado a carta topográfica 1:10000, imagem HRC do satélite CBERS-2B e demais informações foram incorporadas ao banco de dados do SIG/SPRING. Como requisito para estimar perda estabeleceu-se o uso atual da terra na microbacia hidrográfica do Ceveiro, situada no município de Piracicaba, SP. Foi constatado que no cenário atual a MHC é utilizada em sua maior parte por lavoura de cana-de-açúcar e pastagem. Verificou-se ainda que as áreas de preservação permanente não estão em conformidade com a lei vigente, ocupando atualmente uma área de 205,53 hectares e se fossem restituídas passariam a ocupar 540,70 ha. O cenário conforme a legislação vigente foi o que apresentou menor perda de solo seguido pelo uso conforme o PL 1.876/99 e uso atual. / This study evaluated soil losses in four different scenarios of the Ceveiro Watershed with the help of USLE: use of 1995, current use (2010), used according to current legislation and use as PL 1.876/99. For this purpose we used a 1:10000 topographic map, HRC image of CBERS-2B and other information were incorporated into the GIS database / SPRING. As a prerequisite to estimate loss established the current land use in the Ceveiro Watershed, located in Piracicaba, SP. It was found that the MHC in the current scenario is used mostly for farming sugar cane and pasture. It was also found that the areas of permanent preservation are not in accordance with applicable law, currently occupying an area of 205,53 ha and would be returned to occupy 540,70 ha. The scenario according to current legislation showed the lowest soil loss followed by use as PL 1.876/99 and current use.

Oral clefts are the most common form of birth defects in the United States (US) and the State of Utah has among the highest prevalence of oral clefts in the nation. The overall objective of this dissertation was to examine the spatial distribution of oral clefts and their linkage with a broad range of demographic, behavioral, social, economic, and environmental risk factors through the application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial statistics. Using innovative linked micromaps plots, we investigated the geographic patterns of oral clefts occurrence from 1998 to 2002 and their relationships with maternal smoking rates and proportion of American Indians and Alaskan Natives (AIAN) at large scales across the US. The findings indicated higher oral clefts occurrence in the southwest and the midwest and lower occurrence in the east. Furthermore, these spatial patterns were significantly related to the smoking rates and AIAN. Then at the small area level, hierarchical Bayesian models were built to examine the spatial variation in oral clefts risk in the State of Utah from 1995 to 2004 and to assess association with mothers using tobacco, mothers consuming alcohol during pregnancy, and the proportion of mothers with no high school diploma. Next, multi-scalar spatial clustering and cluster techniques were used to test the hypothesis whether there was spatial clustering of oral clefts anywhere in the State of Utah and whether there were statistically significant local clusters with elevated oral cleft cases. Results generally revealed modest spatial variation in oral clefts risk in the State of Utah, with no pronounced spatial clustering, indicating environmental exposures are unlikely plausible cause of oral clefts. However, a few notable areas within Tri-County Local Health District, Provo/Brigham Young University, and North Orem had a tendency toward elevated oral clefts cases. Investigation of the maternal characteristics of these potential clusters supports the hypotheses that maternal smoking, lower education level, and family history are possible causes of oral clefts. Throughout this dissertation, we demonstrated how birth defects data collected by state and local surveillance systems coupled with GIS and spatial statistics methods can be useful in exploratory etiologic research of birth defects.

The concept of proximity is an important aspect of human reasoning. Despite the diversity of applications that require proximity measures, the most intuitive notion is that of spatial nearness. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the underpinnings of the notion of nearness, propose suitable formalisations and apply them to the processing of GIS data. More particularly, this work offers a framework for spatial proximity that supports the development of more intuitive tools for users of geographic data processing applications. Many of the existing spatial reasoning formalisms do not account for proximity at all while others stipulate it by using natural language expressions as symbolic values. Some approaches suggest the association of spatial relations with fuzzy membership grades to be calculated for locations in a map using Euclidean distance. However, distance is not the only factor that influences nearness perception. Hence, previous work suggests that nearness should be defined from a more basic notion of influence area. I argue that this approach is flawed, and that nearness should rather be defined from a new, richer notion of impact area that takes both the nature of an object and the surrounding environment into account. A suitable notion of nearness considers the impact areas of both objects whose degree of nearness is assessed. This is opposed to the common approach of only taking one of both objects, seen as a reference to assess the nearness of the other to it, into consideration. Cognitive findings are incorporated to make the framework more relevant to the users of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with respect to their own spatial cognition. GIS users bring a wealth of knowledge about physical space, particularly geographic space, into the processing of GIS data. This is taken into account by introducing the notion of context. Context represents either an expert in the context field or information from the context field as collated by an expert. In order to evaluate and to show the practical implications of the framework, experiments are conducted on a GIS dataset incorporating expert knowledge from the Touristic Road Travel domain.

The rigorous developments of GIS over the past decades have enabled application developers to create powerful systems that are used to facilitate the management of spatial data. Unfortunately, each one of these systems is specific to a local service, with little or no interconnection with services in other locales. This makes it virtually impossible to perform dynamic and interactive GIS operations across multiple locales which have similar or dissimilar system configurations. The Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS) resolved the problems partially by offering excellent conceptual and logical abstraction model for data exchange. Recent advancements of the Internet enlightened the GIS community as to the realization of an ideal concept of information interchange. A suite of new technologies that embraces Extensible Markup Language (XML), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Portable Network Graphics (PNG) and Java creates a powerful and new perspective that can be applied to all phases of online GIS system development. The online GIS is a Web-based approach to integrating diverse spatial data sources for GIS applications. To address the spatial data integration options and implications related to the Web-based approach the investigation was undertaken in 5 phases: (1) Determine the mapping requirements of graphic and non-graphic spatial data for online GIS application; (2) Analyze the requirements of spatial data integration for online environments; (3) Investigate a suitable method for integrating different formats of spatial data; (4) Study the feasibility and applicability of setting up the online GIS; and (5) Develop a prototype for online sharing of teaching resources. Resulting from the critical review on current Internet technology, a conceptual framework for spatial data integration was proposed. This framework was based on the emerging Internet technology on XML, SVG, PNG, and Java. It was comprised of four loosely coupled modules, namely, Application Interface, Presentation, Integrator, and Data module. This loosely coupled framework provides an environment that will be independent of the underlying GIS data structure and makes it easy to change or update the system as a new task or knowledge is acquired. A feasibility study was conducted to test the applicability for the proposed conceptual framework. A detailed user requirements and system specification was thus devised from the feasibility study. These user requirements and system specification provided some guidelines for online GIS application development. They were expressed specifically in terms of six aspects: (1) User; (2) Teaching resources management; (3) Data; (4) Cartography; (5) Functions; and (6) Software development configuration. A prototype system based on some of the devised system specifications was developed. In the prototype software design, the architecture of a Three-Tier Client-Server computing model was adopted. Due to the inadequacy of native support for SVG and PNG in all currently available Web browsers, the prototype was thus implemented in HTML, Java and vendor specific vector format. The prototype demonstrated how teaching resources from a variety of sources and format (including map data and non-map resources) were integrated and shared. The implementation of the prototype revealed that the Web is still an ideal medium for providing wider accessibility of geographical information to a larger number of users through a corporate intranet or the Internet cost-effectively. The investigation concluded that current WWW technology is limited in its capability for spatial data integration and delivering online functionality. However, developing of XML-based GIS data model and graphic standards SVG and PNG for structuring and transferring spatial data on the Internet appear to be providing solutions to the current limitations. It is believed that the ideal world where everyone retrieving spatial information contextually through a Web browser disregarding the information format and location will eventually become true.

Community forestry is now a popular approach in forest management globally. Although local communities have previously been involved in forest management in various minor ways, community-based forestry is very new in the Australian context. Because of the multiple interests of forest users and other community interest groups, a wider range of up-to-date information is being requested in community forestry, than has been used in ‘conventional’ government-based forest management in the past. The overall aim of this research was to explore the potential and constraints for the application of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology in community forest management in Australia and to relate the results also to Nepal. Specific objectives were to: (i) review the applications of GIS in forestry and community forestry worldwide, (ii) determine stakeholders’ views on their requirements for the use of GIS in community-based forest management, (iii) prepare and demonstrate various practical applications of GIS requested by community groups in the Wombat State Forest, (iv) identify the strengths and limitations of GIS in community forestry, and (v) relate findings on GIS applications in Australia to community forestry in Nepal. This study involved a combination of three approaches: review of global literature on GIS, use of GIS and related technologies, and participatory action research. A wide variety of spatial information was identified through community groups as important for community forest planning and management.