The frequent reference by geographers and cartographers to 'the language of maps' is made precise by clarifying ways in which maps and other formulations of geographic information constitute a language. Aspects of this language are identified, and emphasis is placed on the use of linguistic concepts for study of models of geographic information…

Geography is rapidly becoming more interactive, especially with the advent of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and their adoption in the public and private sectors. The days of two-dimensional maps are quickly being replaced by geographic images that are stored electronically in computers and handheld…

Provides an overview of current image retrieval systems. Describes the architecture of the SOFM (Self Organizing Feature Maps) based image retrieval system, discussing the system architecture and features. Introduces the Kohonen model, and describes the implementation details of SOFM computation and its learning algorithm. Presents a test example…