Mark Altaweel

Mark Altaweel is a Reader in Near Eastern Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, having held previous appointments and joint appointments at the University of Chicago, University of Alaska, and Argonne National Laboratory. Mark has an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Masters and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
Intertwining views of sightseeing and eating patterns of tourists on the West Coast of New Zealand over 3 days. In spatial ringmap, each ring represents a sub-regional zone ordered from North to South working outwards. Each sector represents one hour starting from zero o’clock of the first day. The spatial ringmap and the inset map display the temporal and the overall volume of sightseeing (colour) and eating (extrusion) activities in the 20 sub-regional zones respectively.

Multi-view GIS

Mark Altaweel

Multi-view GIS provides different perspectives of space and time for a given geographic area.

Screenshot from The Big Board system in action which is a an open-source, web based, real time visual collaborative environment that runs on all modern web browsers and uses open-source web standards developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and WorldWideWeb Consortium (W3C). A control panel on left provides access to standard drawing tools and options to share information.

Real-time Collaborative GIS

Mark Altaweel

Real-time collaborative GIS (RCGIS) enables users, from domain experts to common citizens, to collaborate on given issues and share data easily through a distributed framework.

Map of global travel times.

4D GIS and Prediction

Mark Altaweel

For the last two decades, GIS technologies have increasingly been used to incorporate not only spatial relationships but also analyzing and visualizing space across time. Spatial-temporal GIS, or 4D GIS, has, in particular, become essential in areas where GIS is needed for predicting dimensions across time.

Query result of GTS spatial data in mongoDB. From: Zhang, Song, & Liu, 2014.

GIS and NoSQL Databases

Mark Altaweel

Relational databases present some limitations to scaling, preventing or limiting the applicability of big data and real-time data problems utilized within GIS. More and more GIS software companies and developers are adopting NoSQL formats where data retrieval is generally faster and easier to structure. NoSQL also facilitates analysis and integration within a variety of tools, which is why open source GIS has proven to be the most useful arena for NoSQL databases.

Extracted events relating to Hurricane Sandy from 50 CNN news reports for the period Oct 24–Nov 04, 2012. From: Wang & Stewart, 2015).

GIS and Natural Language Processing

Mark Altaweel

Within GIS, natural language processing can be utilized for spatial understanding of where events, places, or people may relate to a given phenomenon.