That’s right. First Law of Geography, from Dr. Waldo Tobler.
Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. [Tobler, 1970, p.236]
Not to be confused with my First Law of Cartography.
If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.
Prior to attending Redlands,Tobler’s First Law wasn’t in any curriculum I experienced. Then again, mixing geography, poly sci, civil engineering, and art together, it could have been lost in there somewhere. Still, I’ve been in the profession for, oh, ten years and it never came up at work.
That’s why I’m writing this post. How many of you know this? A quick survey of my class, half of them hadn’t. I’m curious about the rest of us.
On another note, Dr. Tobler is going to be at ESRI this Wednesday for the U. of Redlands MSGIS Colloquium on the topic of, “Modeling and exploration of spatially continuous potentials and associated cartographic representation via vector fields of the geographic migration of people.”
Whatever that means?
I’ll be willing to ask questions if you want. Just comment. Or, if you’re at ESRI on Wednesday, just show up and ask him yourself.
Two words….pycnophylactic interpolation.
There used to be an ArcView 3.x avenue script that let you do that interpolation. Dr. Tobler is a treasure to the discipline.
Jeremy
Comment by Jeremy — October 29, 2007 @ 5:32 pm