3D GIS for Geo-Coding human activity in micro-scale urban environments

Abstract

The study of human activity and movement in space and time has been an important research area in the social sciences. However, the difficulty in collecting and analyzing the space-time activity (STA) data using current 3D location positioning techniques has limits in applying the time-geographic and activity theory to transportation and urban research and analyses. This paper develops a "3D Indoor Geo-Coding" technique to identify 3D indoor locational data for analyzing human activities. For implementing 3D positioning methods, this paper presents (1) to model micro-scale urban environments to be a frame of reference (reference data) to identify distance and direction, in order to obtain locational data, and (2) to develop a 3D indoor geo-coding method to identify locational data on individual activities based on the reference data. Finally, this paper describes the output from implementing the 3D indoor geo-coding technique to demonstrate the potential benefits of the 3D indoor geo-coding technique for improving the speed of emergency response using GIS data of the study area at Minnesota State University-Mankato, MN (USA). © Springer-Verlag 2004.