Towards a GIS-Based Analytical Time-Geographic Framework for Physical and Virtual Activities

人类活动在空间和时间上相互作用和相互交织，创造了一个复杂的社会系统，以满足我们的生理、经济和社会需求。信息和通信技术(信通技术)的最新发展，如互联网和手机，为人们提供了一个将其活动从物理空间扩展到虚拟空间的环境，预计将导致人类活动模式的重要变化。哈格斯特兰德的时间地理学为在不同类型的约束下研究时空背景下的人类活动提供了一个有用的概念框架。然而，经典的时间地理学没有提供足够的方法来表示和分析虚拟活动及其与物理活动的相互作用。此外，在为研究物理和虚拟活动的时间-地理分析框架开发业务地理信息系统方面取得的进展有限。本研究的目的是：1)扩展Hagerstrand的经典时间地理学，以开发一个扩展的时空概念和分析功能框架，以支持涉及物理和虚拟活动及其相互作用的研究和应用；2)提供一个可操作的时空地理信息系统，以实现扩展的时间地理概念和探索性时空分析功能。基于扩展的时间-地理框架，该项目将开发一个时空地理信息系统设计，以支持扩展的时间-地理概念的表示和分析。这项研究的成果之一将是一个可操作的原型系统，用于实施和评估时空地理信息系统设计。该项目还将使用模拟的活动/旅行数据集和从先前研究中收集的大型人口迁移数据集来评估扩展的时间-地理框架及其探索性分析功能，该研究的结果将包括扩展的时间-地理框架、空间-时间地理信息系统设计和可操作的原型地理信息系统，可以为支持其他领域的各种应用提供有用的基础，例如基于活动的交通研究、基于个体的空间显式生态建模和流行病学建模以及基于位置的服务(LBS)。这样的研究成果可以帮助其他研究人员利用现代信息和通信技术更好地分析和理解复杂的人类活动模式和相互作用。例如，交通规划者可以从这项研究中受益，通过时空地理信息系统设计来帮助他们分析和更好地理解个人如何组织他们的活动和旅行模式，以及如何在物理和虚拟空间与其他人互动。此外，这项研究有可能促进空间和时间一体化社会科学的发展，这将对社会科学研究产生更广泛的影响。

Human activities interact and intertwine in space and time to create a complex social system to fulfill our physiological, economic, and social needs. Recent developments in information and communications technologies (ICT), such as the Internet and cell phones, have offered people an environment to expand their activities from physical space to virtual space and are expected to lead to important changes in human activity patterns. Hagerstrand's time geography suggests a useful conceptual framework for studying human activities in a space-time context under different types of constraints. However, the classical time geography does not offer adequate methods of representing and analyzing virtual activities and their interactions with physical activities. Furthermore, limited progress has been made in the development of an operational geographic information system (GIS) for an analytical time-geographic framework of studying physical and virtual activities. This research aims at: 1) extending Hagerstrand's classical time geography to develop an extended framework of space-time concepts and analysis functions that can support research and applications involving both physical and virtual activities and their interactions; and 2) providing an operational space-time geographic information system to implement the extended time-geographic concepts and exploratory spatio-temporal analysis functions. Based on the extended time-geographic framework, this project will develop a space-time GIS design to support representations and analysis of the extended time-geographic concepts. One outcome of this research will be an operational prototype system to implement and assess the space-time GIS design. This project also will use a simulated activity/travel dataset and a large population migration dataset collected from a previous study to evaluate the extended time-geographic framework and its exploratory analysis functions,The outcomes of this research, which will include an extended time-geographic framework, a space-time GIS design, and an operational prototype GIS, can provide useful foundations in support of various applications in other fields, such as activity-based transportation studies, individual-based spatially-explicit ecological modeling and epidemiological modeling, and location-based services (LBS). Such research results can help other researchers better analyze and understand the complex human activity patterns and interactions with the use of modern information and communications technologies. For example, transportation planners could benefit from this research with a space-time geographic information system design to help them analyze and gain better understanding of how individuals organize their activity and travel patterns and interact with other people in both physical and virtual spaces. Furthermore, this research has potential of contributing to the development of spatially and temporally integrated social sciences that will have broader impacts on social science research.