All Topics
This knowledge area embodies a variety of data driven analytics, geocomputational methods, simulation and model driven approaches designed to study complex spatial-temporal problems, develop insights into characteristics of geospatial data sets, create and test geospatial process models, and construct knowledge of the behavior of geographically-explicit and dynamic processes and their patterns.
Topics in this Knowledge Area are listed thematically below. Existing topics are in regular font and linked directly to their original entries (published in 2006; these contain only Learning Objectives). Entries that have been updated and expanded are in bold. Forthcoming, future topics are italicized.
AM-17 - Intervisibility, Line-of-Sight, and Viewsheds
The visibility of a place refers to whether it can be seen by observers from one or multiple other locations. Modeling the visibility of points has various applications in GIS, such as placement of observation points, military observation, line-of-sight communication, optimal path route planning, and urban design. This chapter provides a brief introduction to visibility analysis, including an overview of basic conceptions in visibility analysis, the methods for computing intervisibility using discrete and continuous approaches based on DEM and TINs, the process of intervisibility analysis, viewshed and reverse viewshed analysis. Several practical applications involving visibility analysis are illustrated for geographical problem-solving. Finally, existing software and toolboxes for visibility analysis are introduced.