GISmatters specializes in quantitative location analysis for business, communications, municipal, environmental, medical, safety, and academic applications. We apply a rich set of GIS and geostatistical methodologies and tools to answer your questions about the spatial relationships among the data crucial to your enterprise.

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Networks

Weighting

Location Analysis: Networks

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A special class of geographic analysis involves relationships measured along a network rather than through the normal two-dimensional map space. Network analysis offers many of the same types of functions as other spatial analysis - proximity, connectivity, distance, time, attributes - but constrained by the network elements. This approach is the natural choice for representing and solving problems involving real-world networks such as travel-time, least-cost, or service area calculations in a road network.

The figures here show part of an analysis of attributes distributed throughout a river drainage basin. The network and surrounding space were measured and colored by their along-network distance from the outlet at the bottom of the basin (star), then their averaged attributes (the abundance of isotopes produced by the spatially-varying cosmic ray flux) were plotted as a function of increasing distance from the outlet. These and many other network-specific techniques can be applied to problems in transportation, site selection, environmental issues, and more.