Acquisition of a Departmental Research Network for the Analysis of Spatial Data

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With partial support from the National Science Foundation, the Geography Department at Ohio State University will acquire a departmental research server (SGI Power Challenge L), 2 graphic workstations (SGI Indigo XZ) and related storage, peripherals and software which allow integration with existing equipment and make the system immediately useful for research by faculty and students. The Geography Department specializes in the analysis of large data sets and focusses on flows of people and goods. The instruments will assist in research in visualization and exploratory data analysis and specific research projects include studies of transportation, migration, trade and information flows. The common tools developed in the course of this work will then be applied to related domains. These include research in time series of air passenger flows, simulation of major interruptions in transportation networks and models of issues related to regional economics and structural change. Recently new large spatial flow data sets have become available and these involve flows of air passengers and urban traffic. However their utility is limited by the lack of optimal analytic techniques. New methods of data exploration and analysis have been proposed, developed and partially tested. However progress has been limited by the lack of computer hardware and software. This award will remove these constraints.