Weibel Presents Seminar and Workshop

The GISC is pleased to welcome, as a visiting scholar, Prof. Robert Weibel from the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich. Prof. Weibel's academic interests fall within the domain of GIS: specifically, automated map generalization, digital terrain modeling and visualization, and cartographic visualization in GIS. See http://www.geo.unizh.ch/~weibel/ for more information about his interests and background. 

Prof. Weibel has agreed to present both a seminar and a workshop in April which will be of interest to many in the UCB GIS community.

Workshop on Digital Terrain Modeling

Presented by Robert Weibel
Professor of Geographic Information Science
University of Zurich Switzerland
weibel@geo.unizh.ch
(510) 642 8641

Dates and Venue:
(2-day workshop)
Friday, April 28, 9:00-12:30 and 2pm-5:30pm
Thursday, May 4, 9:00-12:30 and 2pm-5:30pm
Mulford 124

Target Audience:
Graduate students and postgraduate researchers with an interest to learn more about the principles and techniques behind digital terrain modeling functions of GIS.

Prerequisites:

  • Knowledge of the technical foundations of GIS, particularly spatial data models 
  • Knowledge of the mathematical techniques needed for geometric algorithms, including foundations of calculus and linear algebra. 

If you have any questions about the prerequisites, feel free to contact the instructor at the email address or phone number given above.

Fees:
There will be a charge to cover the cost for handouts and other course materials, no higher than $20.00.

Registration Required:
This workshop is intended for members of the UCB community with the required knowledge prerequisites. Space is limited, so pre-registration is required. To register, send email including your name, department and campus status (eg. faculty, grad, post-doc) to Rain Simar.

Contents and Course Outline:
Topography is a major factor in the explanation of many spatial phenomena and the management of natural resources. Topography also plays a major role in the man-made environment and is of vital interest to fields such as civil engineering, planning, or flight simulation. In more than four decades since its beginnings in the late 1950s, digital terrain modeling has therefore become a vital component of geographic information systems (GIS).

The course will emphasize techniques rather than applications of digital terrain models (DTMs). That is, rather than reviewing the diverse applications of terrain modeling, we will explore the techniques that stand behind this important activity of GIScience. However, ample illustrations and examples will be provided to link the techniques back to relevant associated application areas. The course will note feature lab exercises, but demos will be given. Note also that due to lack of time, the discussion of terrain visualization techniques has been excluded.

  • Introduction: Components of a DTM and DTM systems 
  • DTM Generation -- Terrain Data Capture: Review of data capture
    techniques, with emphasis on recent developments (InSAR, laser scanning) 
  • DTM Generation -- Model Construction: Data models for DTMs, principles of interpolation (incl. interpolation from contour data), triangulation, decimation of DTMs and TINs 
  • DTM Interpretation and Analysis -- Quality control, DTM interpretation for geomorphometric analysis, extraction of topographic objects from DTMs 
  • Extension of 2.5-D to 3-D Modeling -- Requirements, data models, and components of 3-D modeling systems 

Course Materials:
A course book will be provided

Seminar

Seminar co-hosted by GISC and CAMFER
WED 19 April 2000 in Mulford 124
11-12 Noon

"Spatio-temporal Representation and Analysis of Moving Point Data, with Applications to Wildlife Research"

The talk will start out with a general review of the state of the art of temporal GIS as well as spatial analysis of point data in wildlife biology and other spatial sciences, leading to an analysis of the requirements for better methods for spatio-temporal data analysis and representation. Following that, I will present several new (and we believe, ground-breaking) methods for representing and analyzing moving point data (i.e., telemetry data for individual animals) based on work by Stephan Imfeld, who recently completed his PhD thesis at the University of Zurich. The talk will conclude with an outlook on extensions of this work in light of future research.