Journal of Spatial Analysis

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Spatial analysis as the main approach of geography was reviewed and searched through its historical development. The results of this exploratory research showed that this approach was born after the Second World War due to the overall interest of geographers to develop universal theories and laws. The advocators of this field believed that the old regional geography was not able to develop a scientific and applied knowledge. The main motivation of the development of the spatial analysis was the quantitative revolution of the 1960’s which was triggered by the article published by Shaeffer in 1953. This was followed by some prominent geographers such as Bungeh, Ulman, Barry, Hagget, Chorley and others. Bungeh and Harvey strengthened the philosophical foundation of spatial analysis and others such as Hagget , Chorley and Hajestrand published important books in the field of quantitative geography. The main objective of spatial analysis is to analyze the distributions through the identification of their global and local structures and reasoning these structures by their spatial relationship with other distributions. In this regard it uses quantitative data and mathematical language to achieve the spatial theories and laws.

     The spatial analysis studies the spatial distributions and structures. These are the entities that are not subject to the human interpretation and thinking. This approach is true in the both physical and human geography. The knowledge it tries to achieve is the theories and laws about the spatial distributions. The methodology of spatial analysis is the quantitative methods such as experiment and survey. Thus in terms of ontology the entities of spatial analysis are independent of human mind and objective. The spatial characteristics of distributions are not constructed but discovered. The methodology used in spatial analysis is quantitative and objective including some methods such as experiment and survey. In 1980 and onward, human geography tried to move toward qualitative methods such hermeneutics but during 21^st century all branches of geography are using quantitative methods more frequently than qualitative ones; but the use of the combined version of quantitative and qualitative methods is becoming more frequent day by day.

  The introduction of Geographic Information System as the operational environment for spatial analysis works the approach has become more widespread and dominant. Geographers are now able to analyze more spatial data and discover more spatial theories to solve the spatial problems. GIS is the main tool for spatial analysis and by introducing the science of geostatistics has improved the scientific and applied power of spatial analysis. The application of quantitative geography including geostatistics and GIS requires improved knowledge of mathematics, geometry and statistics; the main language of today geography. The spatial analysis covers the important topics of geography including spatial distributions, regions, spatial relations especially the relation between human and environment, spatial structures, spatial reasoning, interpolation, and the most important topic of spatial planning. The spatial analysis is the only scientific field to define and develop spatial planning. With correct and logic spatial planning there won’t be any environmental hazards. Because in any region all human settlements and activities are planned according the potentials of the region.

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Designing and implementing a 3D indoor navigation web application
              Extended abstract
Nowadays, due to the complexity of interior space of buildings, the need arises for indoor navigation inside such spaces. Indoor navigation systems may be helpful for emergency evacuation of the crowd in natural hazards such as earthquake as well as human-made disasters. These systems can also act as a decision support system for officials. Literature survey on indoor navigation services shows that a large number of researches have been conducted around designing and implementing such systems but automatic indoor spaces topology extraction of the current building information models remains as a challenge. This research aims to introduce, design and implement a web-based indoor navigation system using CityGML data model in LOD4 (level of detail) to overcome the mentioned problem.
The architecture of the current research is a browser-based web application service such that the data model processing and graph creation is implemented on the server side, the client interface and calculated path are represented on the client side (browser). Through the CityGML data model processing, firstly, the building navigable spaces such as room floor, doors and stairs are extracted and then, each space as a node and the connections between the nodes are defined as edges, are imported to the navigation graph. Programming on the server side has been performed by Python language and web development languages including HTML (Hypertext Markup language), JavaScript, JQuery and AJAX are used on the client side. Cesium virtual globe has been exploited to display the data model and the calculated route.
To evaluate the introduced methodology and designed service, a three floor house with CityGML format in LOD4 was used as the case study. Generally, a client can request a 3D calculated path by selecting the source and destination points on the client browser. The server receives the request and returns the response as a 3D line to the client browser on the Cesium environment. In addition, a descriptive graphical user interface for visual inception of the route is offered to the users on their browser.
One of the advantages of the designed web application is that, the service is implemented on the browser. Hence, all devices equipped with a browser have possibility to run the 3D routing service. Besides the mentioned cross-platform capability, average expectation time of the graphical interface loading, data module processing and path finder module are 7.03 milliseconds, 12.42 seconds and 2.44 seconds respectively that visits a valuable criteria in emergency situations like an earthquake phenomenon. Regarding this fact that CityGML is a new data model and supported by a few software, the introduced architecture causes less implementation costs as well as automation of these systems.
 
Keywords: 3D indoor navigation, web application, interior space of buildings

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Considering the increase in housing construction in developing societies such as Iran, it is necessary to address the issue of reducing construction accidents, especially in metropolises, and related safety measures with the help of emerging technologies. Therefore, the main goal of the current research is to investigate the use of Internet of Things to monitor and control high-risk points in order to reduce accidents and improve safety in the spaces of construction site in Tehran.
In this applied research, first, a library study was conducted regarding the concept and application of Internet of Things in the safety field of the construction industry. Then, high risk points and activities were identified. After that, in the field study phase, this list was corrected and completed by 52 competent building safety consultants. After that, ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with safety experts and knowledgebale in the field of IoT. Therefore, effective solutions based on Internet of Things were extracted to control and monitor high risk points. Also, in this regard, the current situation and required platforms were explained from the aspects of technology, organization, cost and outsourcing.
In fact, the main findings of this research, in the form of a conceptual model, show that paying attention to the stages of choosing the incident, choosing the desired point and activity, determining the appropriate solution for the determined situation (monitoring the amount of movement and health of the structure, monitoring the proximity of flammable materials with other materials, monitoring the proximity of people and machines and preventing the continuation of movement and determining the limits around the openings) and checking the required platforms (infrastructure, support, accreditation, culture, budget, employers and law), respectively, in order to design and implement IoT-based safety systems in the spaces of construction sites is vital.