Franz-Benjamin MocnikParis Lodron University of Salzburg · Faculty of Digital and Analytical Sciences
Franz-Benjamin Mocnik
Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Math. Dr.rer.nat.
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Publications (53)
Maps are good at representing geographic space, but texts have a stronger affordance of telling a story than maps. Telling stories is, however, important to make information more personal and to arrest the map user's attention. This paper contrasts the map and the text media in order to understand why texts are good at telling a story but conventio...
Data is spatial if it contains references to space. We can easily detect explicit references, for example coordinates, but we cannot detect whether data implicitly contains references to space, and whether it has properties of spatial data, if additional semantic information is missing. In this paper, we propose a graph model that meets typical pro...
Information is called spatial if it contains references to space. The thesis aims at lifting the characterization of spatial information to a structural level. Tobler's first law of geography and scale invariance are widely used to characterize spatial information, but their formal description is based on explicit references to space, which prevent...
Geographical information science (GIScience) has, as a young and interdisciplinary field in information science, demands different than the one’s in other disciplines. Other fields have observatories and labor- atories to solve their specific problems, but GIScience has not. The concept of observatories cannot be transferred to GIScience without fu...
Research on information about places can often practically not be clearly demarcated from research on the places themselves. This is not a problem itself but raises the question of how geographical information science and human geography mutually relate. This paper discusses four arguments as to why places and information about them are inextricabl...
Places are not static. For example, social-ecological sacrifice zones influence how people see their own existence in partly economically shaped areas with detrimental social and health characteristics, or even support the formation of these zones through place-making. Likewise, gentrification can lead to territorial conflicts, including cultural h...
The fourth edition of the International Symposium on Platial Information Science (PLATIAL'23) is themed Transforming Places. This motto can be read in two ways: as a status describing places in flux, and in imperative form, echoing a proactive human role in changing the physical, social, economic, cultural, and other conditions of our immediate and...
Maps are excellent as a medium for communicating spatial configurations at geographical scales. However, the communication of thematic qualities of geographical features is constrained by the traditionally assumed strict classification of features on the map and the strong focus on spatial representation. This is despite the fact that places are ce...
Places can hardly be formally represented in such way that their qualities can be experienced from the representation itself. Places are therefore currently largely inaccessible to formal methods, which is one of the reasons why Platial Information Theories and Platial Information Systems do not yet exist. This paper discusses the possibilities tha...
Origin-destination (OD) visualizations can help to understand movement data. Unfortunately, they are often cluttered due to the quadratic growth of the data and complex depictions of the multiple dimensions in the data. Many domain experts have designed visualizations to reduce visual complexity and display multiple data variables. However, OD visu...
The validity of information collections can be verified by their coherence, such as in the case of Volunteered Geographic Information. However, corresponding coherence theories of truth do not readily apply to collections of data if these consist of non-interpreted or virtually non-interpretable symbols, as is often the case with machine learning m...
The reasons for representing places are manifold, and so are the ways in which they are represented. Travel guides, music, and paintings give an impression of often distant places, and scientific texts seek to represent places and their context objectively. By going beyond the existing semantic discourse on representations and focussing on places m...
Maps, like other types of extensive data collections, are usually created and maintained by a larger number of individuals. The number of individuals using the map is even larger in most cases. Considering the complex interaction of these people, the question arises as to why maps can be used meaningfully. Ultimately, the represented geographical r...
Place is a concept that can hardly be formally captured at the moment, as it is unclear how instances of places can formally be represented and how conclusions about places can practically be drawn by technological means. Geographical Information Science scholars hence tend to use the term ‘Place’ even when, in fact, they presume a paradigm similar...
People “live” and constitute places through recurrent practices and experience. Both agency and experience are rooted in cultural embeddings that vary across different world regions. The complexity this entails requires researchers to investigate the concept of place through a variety of cultural lenses. The formal representation of place in GIScie...
People “live” and constitute places through recurrent practices and experience. Both agency and experience are rooted in cultural embeddings that vary across different world regions. The complexity this entails requires researchers to investigate the concept of place through a variety of cultural lenses. The formal representation of place in GIScie...
Big data are not yet commonly used in psychological research as they are often difficultto access and process. One source of behavioral data containing both spatial andthematic information is OpenStreetMap, a collaborative online project aiming to developa comprehensive world map. Besides spatial and thematic information about buildings,streets, an...
Editorial for the Special Feature on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Place.
Maps represent a host of geographical features, but places are usually not among those depicted in detail. This is despite the various functions of a map, many of which refer to places as the common context in which geographical features are used, receive meaning, and even gain identity. Using the example of two sports venues, this paper explores t...
Few laws about geographical information are known, partly because geographical information is inherently complex. Tobler’s first law of Geography and, to a lesser degree, also his second law are among the rare exceptions. In this article, we explore the validity of Benford’s law in the context of the example of OpenStreetMap. More specifically, we...
Tectonic plate motion affects coordinates resulting from GPS measurements and the referencing of aerial and satellite imagery. It therefore impacts the long-term use of global coordinate systems. Over time, the tectonic plates move relative to each other and coordinates become outdated. Most geographic datasets including OpenStreetMap are no except...
Geographical features can be represented in different ways. Buildings, for instance, can be represented as areal features defined by polygonal lines or as point features in a map. While the type of representation chosen to represent a building strongly depends on the scale of the map, it seems common to represent points of interests (POIs) as point...
The naïve algorithm for generating nearest-neighbour models determines the distance between every pair of nodes, resulting in quadratic running time. Such time complexity is common among spatial problems and impedes the generation of larger spatial models. In this article, an improved algorithm for the Mocnik model, an example of nearest-neighbour...
Epidemics and pandemics are geographical in nature and constitute spatial, temporal, and thematic phenomena across large ranges of scales: local infections with a global spread; short-term decisions by governments and institutions with long-term effects; and diverse effects of the disease on many aspects of our lives. Pandemics pose particular chal...
doi: 10.1080/17445647.2020.1776646
doi: 10.1080/17445647.2020.1776646
People ‘live’ and constitute places every day through recurrent practices and experience. Our everyday lives, however, are complex, and so are places. In contrast to abstract space, the way people experience places includes a range of aspects like physical setting, meaning, and emotional attachment. This inherent complexity requires researchers to...
People perceive the environment in various idiosyncratic ways, letting them conceptualize places differently. Representation in a data set and communication about places, however, create the need to reach agreement in the place a symbol or word represents. People have thus to integrate their views about a place. In this paper, we discuss how idiosy...
This editorial presents a special collection of papers addressing the concept of place and its use in geographical information science (GIScience). The concept of place is a topic of increasing interest among GIScience scholars. First attempts to formalize platial information have been made and it is increasingly held that user‐generated data sets...
People share data in different ways. Many of them contribute on a voluntary basis, while others are unaware of their contribution. They have differing intentions, collaborate in different ways, and they contribute data about differing aspects. Shared Data Sources have been explored individually in the literature, in particular OpenStreetMap and Twi...
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project collecting geographical data of the entire world. The level of detail of OSM data and its data quality vary much across different regions and domains. In order to analyse such variations it is often necessary to research the history and evolution of the OSM data.
The OpenStreetMap History Database (OSH...
Map-based navigation is a diverse task that stands in contradiction to the goal of completeness of web mapping services. As each navigation task is different, it also requires and can dispense with different map information to support effective and efficient wayfinding. Task-oriented reduction of the elements displayed in a map may therefore suppor...
The concept of “place” is about to become one of the major research themes in the discipline of geographical information science (GIScience), as well as in adjoining fields. Briefly put, while locations provide objective references (e.g., point coordinates), places are the units utilized by humans to approach the geographic world. The PLATIAL’18 wo...
The concept of "place" is about to become one of the major research themes in the discipline of geographical information science (GIScience), as well as in adjoining fields. Briefly put, while locations provide objective references (e. g., point coordinates), places are the units utilized by humans to approach the geographic world (Goodchild, 2015)...
The fact that an increasing number of people and local authorities are affected by natural hazards, especially floods, highlights the necessity of adequate mitigation and preparedness within disaster management. Many governments, though, have only insufficient monetary or technological capacities. One possible approach to tackle these issues is the...
The fitness for purpose concerns many different aspects of data quality. These aspects are usually assessed independently by different data quality measures. However, for the assessment of the fitness for purpose, a holistic understanding of these aspects is needed. In this paper we discuss two Linked Open Data vocabularies for formally describing meas...
Many complex networks expose global hub structures: for some nodes, the number of incident edges far exceeds the average, leading to a small average shortest path length. Such ‘small-world properties’ are often guided by a scale-free power-law distribution of the node degrees, and self-organization inside the network has been identified as a reason...
Data quality and fitness for purpose can be assessed by data quality measures. Existing ontologies of data quality dimensions reflect, among others, which aspects of data quality are assessed and the mechanisms that lead to poor data quality. An understanding of which source of information is used to judge about data quality and fitness for purpose...
Geospatial data is often spatially aggregated by the use of Discrete Global Grid Systems. References to grid cells are needed for the communication of such data, and different identifier schemes have accordingly been introduced in literature. These schemes suffer, however, from being hard to understand for non-experts, and the geometry of a cell ca...
The tectonic plates of the Earth shift relative to each other, which creates the need to adapt coordinate values on a regular basis. However, such systematic adaptions are not carried out in case of the OpenStreetMap dataset, which should render possible to trace this effect within the dataset. We empirically demonstrate that the effect cannot be t...
Space and time both play a major role in the evolution of traditions. While it is known that processes at different scales guide the evolution of culture, it is not yet clear which structural factors promote the emergence and persistence of traditions. This paper argues that the principle of least effort is among the factors that foster traditions,...
OpenStreetMap and other Volunteered Geographic Information datasets have been explored in the last years, with the aim of understanding how their meaning is rendered, of assessing their quality, and of understanding the community-driven process that creates and maintains the data. Research mostly focuses either on the data themselves while ignoring...
Spatial variance is an important characteristic of spatial random variables. It describes local deviations from average global conditions and is thus a proxy for spatial heterogeneity. Investigating instability in spatial variance is a useful way of detecting spatial boundaries, analysing the internal structure of spatial clusters and revealing sim...
Street networks have been examined in respect to their structure. The author of this paper has previously examined networks from various domains, thereby demonstrating that the polynomial volume law applies to many of them. This paper focuses on the geographical domain only. Thereby, it examines the dimension of street networks, which turns out to...
The comprehension of folksonomies is of high importance when making sense of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), in particular in the case of OpenStreetMap (OSM). So far, only little research has been conducted to understand the role and the evolution of folksonomies in VGI and OSM, which is despite the fact that without a comprehension of th...
Different definitions of data quality and fitness for purpose exist in literature. We propose definitions that align well with existing definitions but emphasize how both concepts relate.
Data and the context in which data is interpreted are subject to imperfection, and the interpretation of the data accordingly depends on the choice of the context. Data quality and fitness for purpose can thus not be assessed without any choice of a context, a fact that can be regarded as an inevitable calibration of the data quality assessment. Th...