Antony Kyle Cooper

Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa | CSIR · Smart Places

Post-conflict reconstruction includes the removal of land mines and remnants of war. The CSIR conducted field experiments to determine the impact of TNT in the soil on plants as a possible means to detect landmines. All the leaf clip readings were done using a spectrometer to determine reflection and absorption of light at one micrometre intervals...

The Commission on SDI & Standards (and its predecessors) of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) has developed formal models of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), using the viewpoints of the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The Commission described an SDI from the Enterp...

We conducted a study to find out whether and why South African users accepted QGIS. In the quantitative part of the study, we found that QGIS acceptance is primarily influenced by habit, followed by facilitating conditions, price value, and social influence. To better understand and explain these results, we conducted a qualitative study in which s...

The Digital Earth vision foresees the availability and accessibility of geospatial information to achieve the goals of sustainable development, economic growth and social well-being. In the case of urban areas, up-to-date geospatial information is essential for managing a city towards achieving these goals. The rapid shift from rural to urban areas...

The benefits of free and open-source software for geographical information systems, such as QGIS, are appreciated by many all over the world. However, QGIS adoption in South Africa is not primarily influenced by the benefits attributed to open-source software, such as cost benefits, customizability, improved reliability, quality and security. In th...

This chapter presents the “COVID-19 Vulnerability Dashboard” for South Africa, developed by the CSIR for the National Disaster Management Centre (NDMC). It maps vulnerability to COVID-19 for the whole of South Africa, down to the level of the 103576 enumerator areas (EAs). The COVID-19 Vulnerability Dashboard aims at helping the NDMC, local authori...

Geospatial information and technologies are widely used in South Africa, initially mostly with proprietary software but today, mature, open source alternatives such as QGIS are available. We wanted to find out if and why South African users accepted QGIS, globally the most widely used free and open source GIS. We adapted the extended unified theory...

The study of terrain and all its related elements and facets are of crucial importance to the military, with the importance of terrain being recognised by military leaders more than two thousand years ago. Military operations can occur at any of the three levels of war: tactical, operational and strategic, and can be a combat operation or a militar...

In this study, we model the risk of robbery in the City of Tshwane in South Africa. We use the collective knowledge of two prominent spatial theories of crime (social disorganization theory, and crime pattern theory) to guide the selection of data and employ rudimentary geospatial techniques to create a crude model that identifies the risk of futur...

Geospatial data, such as administrative boundaries, property information, addresses, streets and utility networks, provide the backbone for city governance. Availability, accessibility and usability of such data and related services are typically facilitated through a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), which requires careful stakeholder coordinatio...

Publicly-available mobile data can be used to derive fine grain commuting and travel patterns. These types of data include geocoded or geotagged discrete units of communication: messages, posts, tweets, status updates, check-ins, images and the like on a variety of social networking services. Clearly, there are ethical issues concerning the use of...

Spatial data infrastructure No mapping agency can expect to capture and process entirely by itself, all the geospatial data needed for its products. The agency needs data sets from elsewhere and workflows and protocols for creating its various products. Unsurprisingly, such workflows and inter-institutional arrangements have evolved into broader co...

Collaborative custodianship refers to an arrangement where a number of custodians work together to produce integrated datasets for a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), e.g. local authorities contributing address or street data to a national SDI dataset. Collaborative cloud mapping allows for ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand, configured and tailor-...

South Africa's commitment to meeting the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, "Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable", requires the country to have an understanding of the range of possible, likely and preferred urban futures. With concepts such as digital cities, smart cities, smart infrastructure, smart pl...

The main focus of this study was to investigate the level of integration between various public transport systems operating within the City of Johannesburg. Accessibility was used to evaluate integration, since integration influences accessibility. Easy access to available public transport from departure points, enables movement between locations a...

Models which integrate and evaluate diverse factors of Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) change can be used to guide planners in making more informed decisions and achieving a balance between urban growth and preservation of the natural environment. The implementation of these models at a provincial scale is however very limited in South Africa. LULC...

A key challenge in rural South Africa is providing social facilities such as clinics. This is difficult due to the nature of settlement distributions, especially in traditional authority areas. Geospatial accessibility analysis can help find suitable locations for facilities to serve the inhabitants. Settlements in South Africa's traditional author...

The terms user-generated content, volunteered geographical information, crowdsourcing, citizen science and neogeography are elucidated. The purpose is to expose the range of meanings associated with these terms, and to promote consensus as to their scope and meaning, thereby enhancing the clarity with which discourse around these phenomena may occu...

The demand for geospatial data across different disciplines and organisations has led to the development and implementation of spatial data infrastructures (SDI) and the theory and concepts behind them. An SDI is an evolving concept about facilitating and coordinating the exchange of geospatial data and services between stakeholders from different...

A food environment is a combination of physical, biological, social and psychological factors that affect the eating habits and patterns of people. The food environment is determined by the availability, affordability and access to the food required for a nutritional diet. The characteristics influencing the food environment include the nature of t...

Spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) at various levels (global, regional national, local and corporate) are being developed by and in countries around the world. We assess here the SDI developments in three African countries, Ghana, Namibia and South Africa, using the SDI models developed by the Commission on Geoinformation Infrastructures and Stand...

Spatial data infrastructure (SDI) facilitates the collection and sharing of geographic information developed by different organisations. As a result, SDI initiatives are occurring in different countries. Various government departments are implementing SDI in order to contribute to the achievements of its objectives. SDI assessments to evaluate the...

Remaining ahead of the enemy in all circumstances is crucial to any military power. Geographic information systems (GIS) can provide the military commander with geospatial information about the theatre of war to assist with the planning and execution of a mission. Unfortunately, technology usually comes at a price. GIS is no exception. The cost of...

The Western Cape Province is currently faced with population growth, declining household sizes, increasing household numbers, high levels of migration, urbanization and escalating development pressures. These factors have consequently triggered changes in land use and land cover (LULC) and incited issues such as urban sprawl, marginalization of the...

In urban planning it is important to understand settlements in terms of demographic, socio-economic, physical and political environmental characteristics. The objective is often to support municipalities, regional and national governments with long-term planning tools for the development of infrastructure, facilities and services. In a municipal co...

This article discusses how the use of cellular networks by a criminal offender produces spatio-temporal data that reveals his/her activities and activity space. The methods aim to establish possible paths that the criminal will use to move around in his/her activity space; the edges of the activity space; districts in which the criminal is moving s...

A geographical information system (GIS) database was compiled of Permo-Triassic tetrapod fossils from the Karoo Supergoup in South African museum collections. This database is the first of its kind and has great time applicability for understanding tetrapod biodiversity change though time more than 200 million years ago. Because the museum catalogu...

There are several established methodologies for visualizing space-time data. These visualizations range from complex three-dimensional (3D) animated displays to simple two-dimensional (2D) maps where the incident in time is mapped as a point on a 2D surface. This chapter explores the usability of space-time visualizations for forensic purposes and...

Research shows that food choices are affected by the food environment. Similarly, the presence of fruit and vegetables in the home results in greater fruit and vegetable consumption by children. A food desert is an area without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food, even though it may have food outlets. The main aim of public transpor...

A spatial data infrastructure (SDI) is an evolving concept for facilitating, coordinating and monitoring the exchange and sharing of geospatial data and services. In earlier work, we developed a formal model for an SDI from the Enterprise, Information and Computational Viewpoints of the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing. Within the En...

A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is an evolving concept, essentially consisting of policies, institutional arrangements, Geographical Information Systems (GISs), data bases, networks, Web services and portals to facilitate and coordinate the availability, exchange and sharing of geospatial data and services between stakeholders from different le...

This article reflects discussions German and South African Earth scientists, statisticians and risk analysts had on occasion of two bilateral workshops on Data Integration Technologies for Earth System Modelling and Resource Management. The workshops were held in October 2012 at Leipzig, Germany, and April 2013 at Pretoria, South Africa, and were a...

The Commission on Geoinformation Infrastructures and Standards of the International Cartographic Association ICA is working on defining models of spatial data infrastructures SDIs. SDI models from the enterprise and information viewpoints of the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing RM-ODP have already been presented. Our model from the c...

The National Framework for Geospatial Information Management (NAFGIM) was a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) initiative in Ghana which started around the year 2000. NAFGIM was developed as an integral part of a national effort to manage spatial data pertaining to the environment and natural resources. It sought to bring together technology, polici...

In 2011, the Namibian parliament presented and promulgated the Namibian Spatial Data Infrastructure (NamSDI) with the aim of promoting the sharing and improved access and use of geospatial data and services across Namibia. Notable SDI models, developed from the enterprise, information and computational viewpoints of the Reference Model for Open Dis...

User-Generated Content (UGC) in general, and Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) in particular, are becoming more important as sources for official data bases, such as those used in national Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). Discovering and assessing VGI as suitable geospatial resources for one’s purposes is hence becoming more important,...

Breakwaters protect harbours and coastlines on many continents. Strict packing strategies are used to provide stability. However, damage remains difficult to quantify. As numerical models become more accessible, the connection between micro-and macro-dynamics can be understood more clearly. By using a game physics engine to model regularly and irre...

The internet, the World Wide Web and cheap computing resources have spawned the creation of user-generated content (UGC) in general, and volunteered geographical information (VGI) in particular. A key aspect of such data, when compared against professionally-generated and/or official content, is the provenance or quality of the data, and the docume...

Breakwaters protect harbours and coastlines on many continents. Strict packing strategies are used to provide stability. However, damage remains difficult to quantify. As numerical models become more accessible, the connection between microand macro- dynamics can be understood more clearly. By using a game physics engine to model regularly and irre...

User-Generated Content (UGC) in general, and Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) in particular, are becoming more important as sources for official data bases, such as those used in national Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). Discovering and assessing VGI as suitable geospatial resources for one's purposes is hence becoming more important,...

This paper provides a brief overview of one of the first spatial domain standards: a standard for the domain of Land Administration (LA). This standard is in the draft stage of development now (May 2011). The development of domain standards is a logical follow up after domain-independent standards, which are available now in the area of geo-informa...

The aim of this project was to determine whether the cellular telephones of spectators could be tracked actively while travelling to and from an event, to give them useful travel information en route. Further, we investigated the effect on the tracking results when a large number of people attend such an event, creating cellular telephone network c...

Traditionally, humans used an address as a direction to a building and its occupants. The advent of computers opened up a whole new range of possibilities, such as routing and vehicle navigation, automated processing of mail items, utility planning and maintenance, spatial demographic analysis and geo-marketing. Addressing schemes vary in different...

A spatial data infrastructure (SDI) is an evolving concept for facilitating, coordinating and monitoring the exchange and sharing of geospatial data and services. In earlier work, we developed a formal model for an SDI from the Enterprise, Information and Computational Viewpoints of the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP). We i...

INTRODUCTION The spatial planning system in many countries includes three levels: national, regional and local. Planning documents at each level have various degree of detail and scope of content. Spatial planning and cadastral data are the most important information provided by public administrations. The most essential document of all planning st...

Traditionally, humans used an address as a direction to a building and its occupants. The advent of computers opened up a whole new range of possibilities, such as routing and vehicle navigation, automated processing of mail items, utility planning and maintenance, spatial demographic analysis and geo-marketing. Addressing schemes vary in different...

Commons are resources that belong to or affect an entire community. In a Web 2.0 environment, users interact and collaborate with each other to produce user generated content that belongs to the community, i.e. a commons. Web 2.0 implies that everyone with Internet access can join the user community. Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is a sp...

The University of Pretoria in South Africa and the Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences in Poland have a joint research project under the SA/Poland Cooperation Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technologies, entitled Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) for Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) and Geoportals. The Interne...

An address assignment scheme identifies the components that make up an address and describes how values are assigned to these components. Address assignment schemes vary from country to country and there is often a strong cultural, religious and traditional connotation to them. We describe the current situation of addressing in Botswana, which is c...

Online social spaces have become very popular in the past couple of decades. With the great numbers of users in the online environments it becomes obvious that the human factor plays an important role in the social structure of such environments. In online virtual worlds such as Second Life one may encounter not only civil, but even criminal offens...

This paper is an invited commentary from a South African perspective on papers in a special issue of the journal, Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research, on crime patterns and the structure of urban geographies.

The stratigraphic subdivision of the Karoo Supergroup of South Africa has been addressed for more than a century by various geoscience studies. A lack of good lithostratigraphic markers in the Beaufort Group and the fact that the succession preserves a rich diversity of therapsid fossils for which there is a robust taxonomic scheme, make biostratig...

A virtual globe is a data repository providing masses of digital geographical information in the form of a globe, generally over the Internet, with the best-known example being Google Earth [Google 2010a]. Typically, a virtual globe uses imagery (from satellite- or aircraft-based cameras) for the backdrop, overlaid with various vector data sets (of...

CSIR 3rd Biennial Conference 2010. Science Real and Relevant. CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa, 30 August – 01 September 2010 The South African Breastmilk Reserve (SABR) is a public benefit organisation that coordinates the equitable distribution of donor breast milk to neo-natal intensive care units (NICUs). The donated...

29th Annual Southern African Transport Conference, "Walk Together", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa, 16 - 19 August 2010 During 2005, the CSIR ran a small experiment in the Pretoria area to test the feasibility of tracking passively cellular telephones, and hence people. Based on the success of that pilot, we initiated...

We examine the question of stability of breakwater structures using the simulation software PhysX. This "physics engine" can be used to construct various packings of breakwater ele-ments, each of which can be used to analyze the damage when these structures are exposed to (wave) forces of varying magnitude. We find that the damage is roughly propor...

Conventionally in formal concept analysis (FCA), concept stability is preferred in the lattice, because instability (i.e. low stability) represents noise that clouds the analysis of the data. High stability means there are many objects with the same intent or many attributes with the same extent, which could be interpreted as redundant or absent ob...

The Internet has spawned the development of virtual communities or virtual social networks which gen-erate and share information with one another, and with the public at large. Volunteered geographical infor-mation (VGI) refers to user-generated content that is made available as base data on public mapping websites or as third party data overlaid o...

A method is proposed for the modelling of fluid-solid interaction in applications where fluid forces dominate. Data are transferred between two stand-alone codes: a dedicated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code capable of free surface modelling via the volume of fluid (VOF) approach and a physics engine code capable of predicting the movement o...

A variety of concrete armour units laid on top of rubble mounds are used to protect breakwaters and other harbour infrastructure. Coastal engineers build three-dimensional physical scale models to understand the dynamic processes caused by seas on such infrastructure. We are developing analytical techniques for understanding breakwater structural s...

Early in 2007, the CSIR conducted an experiment to track the cellular telephones of a small group of people as they moved to and from an event, to test the viability of using such tracking to provide the participants with useful traffic information. This project raised a number of ethical issues, which prompted this paper and which we discuss here....

The Commission on Geospatial Data Standards of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) is working on defining formal models and technical characteristics of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). The Commission has already presented models of the Enterprise and Information Viewpoints from the ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processin...

In February 2009, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released the pre-print version of its report, "Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward". While the report focused on forensic science in the United States, it did draw on inputs from other countries and much of the report is relevant to forensic science in other co...

African Digital Scholarship & Curation Conference, CSIR Conference Centre, Pretoria, South Africa, 12-14 May, 2009 There are many standards available for archiving digital and analogue (paper) data and documents, but these come from various sources and it can be difficult to understand what standards should be used, and where. Researchers have exec...

This paper aims to provide some geographical information (geoinformation) perspectives on innovation and economic growth in Africa, for the first Session of the Committee on Development Information, Science and Technology (CODIST-1) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). This paper also considers the issues of intellectual pr...

Science real and relevant: 2nd CSIR Biennial Conference, CSIR International Convention Centre Pretoria, 17&18 November 2008 The authors have applied various numerical techniques to describe the stability of breakwater structures under the exposure of waves. These studies are intended to get a better understanding of the parameters playing a role in...

The Commission on Spatial Data Standards of the International Cartographic Association is working to define formal models and technical characteristics of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). To date, this work has been restricted to the Enterprise and Information Viewpoints from the ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing standard. The...

Paper presented at the 2008 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference 29 September - 3 October 2008 "Open Source Geospatial: An Option for Developing Nations", Cape Town International Convention Centre, Cape Town, South Africa Various countries and international organizations have address standards or are developing them. An address i...

Paper presented at the 2008 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference 29 September - 3 October 2008 "Open Source Geospatial: An Option for Developing Nations", Cape Town International Convention Centre, Cape Town, South Africa The standard defines eleven address types that describe all forms of addresses currently in use in South Afri...