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The purpose of this study is to develop a spatio-temporal neighbourhood-level house price index (STNL-HPI) incorporating a geographic information system (GIS) functionality that can be used to improve the house price indexation system.

By using the Malaysian house price index (MHPI) and application of geographically weighted regression (GWR), GIS-based analysis of STNL-HPI through an application called LHPI Viewer v.1.0.0, the stand-alone GIS-statistical application for STNL-HPI was successfully developed in this study.

The overall results have shown that the modelling and GIS application were able to help users understand the visual variation of house prices across a particular neighbourhood.

This research was only able to acquire data from the federal government over the period 1999 to 2006 because of budget limitations. Data purchase was extremely costly. Because of financial constraints, data with lower levels of accuracy have been obtained from other sources. As a consequence, a major portion of data was mismatched because of the absence of a common parcel identifier, which also affected the comparison of this system to other comparable systems.

Neighbourhood-level HPI is needed for a better understanding of the local housing market.

After almost three centuries of employing western educational approaches, many African societies are still characterized by low western literacy rates, civil conflicts, and underdevelopment. It is obvious that these western educational paradigms, which are not indigenous to Africans, have done relatively little good for Africans. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to argue that the salvation for Africans hinges upon employing indigenous African educational paradigms which can be subsumed under the rubric of ubuntugogy, which the authors define as the art and science of teaching and learning undergirded by humanity toward others.

Therefore, ubuntugogy transcends pedagogy (the art and science of teaching), andragogy (the art and science of helping adults learn), ergonagy (the art and science of helping people learn to work), and heutagogy (the study of self-determined learning). That many great African minds, realizing the debilitating effects of the western educational systems that have been forced upon Africans, have called for different approaches.

One of the biggest challenges for studying and teaching about Africa in Africa at the higher education level, however, is the paucity of published material. Automated generation of metadata is one way of mining massive data sets to compensate for this shortcoming.

Thus, the authors address the following major research question in this paper: What is automated generation of metadata and how can the technique be employed from an African-centered perspective? After addressing this question, conclusions and recommendations are offered.

With the rapid development of the indoor spaces positioning technologies such as the radio-frequency identification (RFID), Bluetooth and WI-FI, the locations of indoor spatial objects (static or moving) constitute an important foundation for a variety of applications. However, there are many challenges and limitations associated with the structuring and querying of spatial objects in indoor spaces. The purpose of this study is to address the current trends, limitations and future challenges associated with the structuring and querying of spatial objects in indoor spaces. Also it addresses the related features of indoor spaces such as indoor structures, positioning technologies and others.

In this paper, the author focuses on understanding the aspects and challenges of spatial database managements in indoor spaces. The author explains the differences between indoor spaces and outdoor spaces. Also examines the issues pertaining to indoor spaces positioning and the impact of different shapes and structures within these spaces. In addition, the author considers the varieties of spatial queries that relate specifically to indoor spaces.

Most of the research on data management in indoor spaces does not consider the issues and the challenges associated with indoor positioning such as the overlapping of Wi-Fi. The future trend of the indoor spaces includes included different shapes of indoors beside the current 2D indoor spaces on which the majority of the data structures and query processing for spatial objects have focused on. The diversities of the indoor environments features such as directed floors, multi-floors cases should be considered and studied. Furthermore, indoor environments include many special queries besides the common ones queries that used in outdoor spaces such as KNN, range and temporal queries. These special queries need to be considered in data management and querying of indoor environments.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper successfully addresses the current trends, limitations and future challenges associated with the structuring and querying of spatial objects in indoor spaces.

Over the past 50 years India has been experiencing rapid population growth, causing the migration of a large part of the population to the cities looking for livelihood. This resulted in massive increments of population in the cities that has led to the increase of pollution. Gujarat, being a highly industrialized state, is a case in point. The systems for treatment and water disposal of this state are highly challenged. The north‐western state of Gujarat has no effective systems for treatment or disposal of waste water. The purpose of this article is to address this problem, introducing a geographic information system (GIS) approach to record the characterization, analyze the needs and generate a conceptual GIS database in the state.

This paper outlines the background, suggested methodology for the development of a GIS database pollution dependent control of water pollution in the state of Gujarat in India. The present research is to install a document management system that has been developed in providing organizing chart, sorting, querying and retrieving of key data. A computerized laboratory information system on monitoring of quality of ambient air has been developed.

An integrated GIS database has been generated involving creation of pollutant contours, querying and visualizing the query output in spatial and non‐spatial form.

The authors have created a complete geo‐spatial database for the environmental monitoring for the whole state of Gujarat. They have dealt with nearly 36,000 different files from different sources and put them together to create the database. A computerized laboratory information system on monitoring of quality of ambient air has been developed. Front‐end application programs have been developed in Visual Basic and the back‐end database to integrate the laboratory data and the existing data in oracle database.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a way of using already existing archival resources in the geographic information system (GIS).

The essence of the methodology used was to identify semantic relations of archival documents with geographical space and develop their metadata into spatially related metadata, ready to use in GIS and to join geographical names occurring in these metadata with exact places to which they were related to. Research was based on two digital collections from the Library of Contemporary History in Stuttgart on-line service. These collections were related to the First World War and they included metadata prepared in MAB standard.

As the results of the research, two sample metadata sets related to posters and ration coupons were developed. Thesauruses of coordinates of places and regions mentioned in documents metadata in different semantic context were also created. To complete the methodology, the assumptions of the GIS structure and concept of applying metadata in them, have been proposed.

The research also presents limitations in effective implementation of the proposed solutions, which lie mainly in lack of rules and consequences in recording geographical names in metadata.

The value of the proposed solution is easy way of using already existing data in GIS and possibilities of gathering, managing, presenting and analyzing archives with one parameter more than in traditional databases – with spatial information. The added value and an effective use of already collected data lies in the strong recommendation of defining and implementation of rules for recording geographical names in archival documents metadata. This will help in a wide use of collected data in any spatial-based solutions as well as in automation of process of joining archives with geographical space, and finally in dissemination of collected resources.

The rapidly emerging of Mobile Internet and the constantly increasing of wireless subscribers' number bring new opportunities and challenges to geographic information sharing and accessing. Current Web GISs, which are accessed by using connection based approaches, are very inefficient in fulfilling the requirements of GIS applications under open, dynamic, heterogeneous and distributed computing environments such as (Mobile) Internet. In this paper, we propose a new system for accessing and sharing distributed geographic information by using mobile agent and GML technologies, in which mobile agents are used to overcome the limitations of traditional distributed computing paradigms in (mobile) Internet context and GML is adopted as the common format for spatial information wrapping and mediation, while SVG is used as a web‐map publishing format that can be processed and displayed in Web browser. A prototype is implemented, which demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.

For this discussion, assume there are n sample observations of the dependent variable y at unique locations. In spatial samples, often each observation is uniquely associated with a particular location or region, so that observations and regions are equivalent. Spatial dependence arises when an observation at one location, say y i is dependent on “neighboring” observations y j, y j∈ϒi. We use ϒi to denote the set of observations that are “neighboring” to observation i, where some metric is used to define the set of observations that are spatially connected to observation i. For general definitions of the sets ϒi,i=1,…,n, typically at least one observation exhibits simultaneous dependence, so that an observation y j, also depends on y i. That is, the set ϒj contains the observation y i, creating simultaneous dependence among observations. This situation constitutes a difference between time series analysis and spatial analysis. In time series, temporal dependence relations could be such that a “one-period-behind relation” exists, ruling out simultaneous dependence among observations. The time series one-observation-behind relation could arise if spatial observations were located along a line and the dependence of each observation were strictly on the observation located to the left. However, this is not in general true of spatial samples, requiring construction of estimation and inference methods that accommodate the more plausible case of simultaneous dependence among observations.

This paper identifies the importance of space management in support of the functions of academic libraries. It reviews current solutions on library space management by pinpointing their advantages and disadvantages, and it introduces GIS (geographic information systems) as a tool for library space management, because of its capacity for analyzing spatial data and interactive information. A proposal is outlined that attempts to highlight the process of developing, implementing, maintaining, and utilizing a GIS system for academic libraries.