Handbook of Applied Spatial AnalysisSoftware Tools, Methods and Applications

The Handbook is written for academics, researchers, practitioners and advanced graduate students. It has been designed to be read by those new or starting out in the field of spatial analysis as well as by those who are already familiar with the field. The chapters have been written in such a way that readers who are new to the field will gain important overview and insight. At the same time, those readers who are already practitioners in the field will gain through the advanced and/or updated tools and new materials and state-of-the-art developments included. This volume provides an accounting of the diversity of current and emergent approaches, not available elsewhere despite the many excellent journals and textbooks that exist. Most of the chapters are original, some few are reprints from the Journal of Geographical Systems, Geographical Analysis, The Review of Regional Studies and Letters of Spatial and Resource Sciences. We let our contributors develop, from their particular perspective and insights, their own strategies for mapping the part of terrain for which they were responsible. As the chapters were submitted, we became the first consumers of the project we had initiated. We gained from depth, breadth and distinctiveness of our contributors’ insights and, in particular, the presence of links between them. The chapters were rigorously refereed blindly by the contributors to this volume. Referee reports were sent to each author and changes made accordingly. We supervised this process to guarantee that authors received reviews that would be useful for finalizing their chapters. The soundness of the comments and ideas have contributed immensely to the quality of the Handbook. Fortunately, we were dealing with truly exemplary scholars, the most distinguished and sophisticated representatives of the fields of inquiry. We thank the contributors for their diligence, not only in providing extremely thoughtful and useful contributions, but also in meeting all deadlines in a timely manner and in following stringent editorial guidelines. Moreover, we acknowledge the generous support provided by the Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience, Vienna University of Economics and Business. Thomas Seyffertitz greatly assisted in keeping the project well organized. Last but not at least, we have benefitted greatly from the editorial assistance he and Ingrid Divis provided. Their expertise in handling several word processing systems, formatting, and indexing, together with their care and attention to detail, helped immeasurably.