>Peter, in my opinion these functions have existed in commercial software
>for many years. Autodesk's Land Development Desktop for instance, and
>Intergraph and Bentley software provide these capabilities.
>David
David, thank you for your reply. I believe that absence of land surface attributes theory results in absence of corresponding software features. As to Intergraph (I worked with it on Intergraph mainframe computer in 1997-1999), it uses only 4 land surface attributes calculated from DEMs: slope steepness, slope aspect, plan curvature, and profile (=vertical) curvature. This is not sufficient to solve even simple tasks on quantitative terrain analysis.
Last time I.S.Evans (1972) has introduced new land surface attributes (plan and profile curvatures) implemented now in commercial software (ARC/INFO, Intergraph,...), after that I have introduced 7 new attrubutes from currently known 18 (Shary, 1995: Shary at al., 2001), how could any software use them if this needs a fundamental theory and several tens of new theorems to be proven? One example is that present-day society (both scientific and commercial) cannot describe slope profiles by regional (non-local) land surface attrubutes, and this makes impossible industrial landscape prognoses (such as detailed prognoses of soil properties) using field measurements and DEMs. Evans (1972) wrote: "...the first law of computer science: 'garbage in, garbage out' ".
Things, which land surface attrributes derived from DEMs are able to describe, are as follows:
(i) surface runoff,
(ii) geometrical land forms (rarely used in Earth sciences),
(iii) thermal regime of slopes,
(iv) altitude zonality:
note that 4 attributes used by Intergraph are obviously not enough for this, and all of them refer to (i) (and DEM itself to (iv)). Although some commercial software use larger set of land surface attributes (e.g., ARC/INFO on Silicon Graphics), I believe that any software is necessarily restricted by the rule: "no theory, no relevant software".
Sincerely,
Peter A. Shary
----- Original Message -----
From: "ðÅÔÒ ûÁÒÙÊ" <p_shary@mail.ru>
To: <gislist@geocomm.com>
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 6:12 AM
Subject: GISList: Land surface analysis - new methods
> Dear All:
>
> A problem of land surface quantitative analysis and mapping remains
essentially unsolved in GISs, mostly because of corresponding fundamental
physical theory absence. Recent advantages in this area (Shary, 1995: Shary
et al., 2001) resulted in essential new possibilities: Analytical GIS Eco is
devoted to this. More information and DEMO can be found at this URL address:
>
> http://members.fortunecity.com/eco4/giseco/
>
> I hope, this topic will appear of interest for many GIS specialists:
further development of theory and applications is able to result in
essential and unexpectable new opportunities in landscape feature prognoses,
geological structure decoding, floods predictions, satellite image
processing, and more.
>
> Any reply or discussion are appreciated.
>
> Shary, P.A., 1995. Land surface in gravity points classification by a
complete system of curvatures. Mathematical Geology 27(3): 373-390.
> Shary, P.A., Sharaya, L.S., Mitusov, A.V., 2001. Fundamental quantitative
methods of land surface analysis. Geoderma - submitted.
>
> Peter A. Shary
>
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