Journal of Geo-information Science, Volume. 22, Issue 1, 30(2020)
Geographical flow can be defined as the movements of geographical objects between different locations, which are usually displayed as the movement of matter, information, energy and funds, e.g. the jobs-housing flow in a city, communications between different mobile phone holders and the fund transferred between different business entities. Due to the existence of the various flows, the link strength between different locations may not depend on distance only, say one may strongly related to a store faraway through express delivery rather than a store nearby. The traditional knowledge of distance-decay law may be changed. As a result, research on the geographical flow may help to understand geographical patterns and their mechanism from a new point of view. Two conceptual models are introduced for the expression of geographical flows in this paper. In the first model, a flow is abstracted as a coordinate quaternion composed of the origin point and the destination point (called the orthonormal flow model). Thus, the flow space can be defined as a 4-D space which is formed by the Cartesian product of two 2-D spaces. In the second model, a flow is composed of the origin point coordinates, the flow length and the flow angle (called the polar coordinate model). Based on the expression models, four distances are defined, specifically, maximum distance, additive distance, average distance and weighted distance. In addition, this paper defines some other flow measurements, including flow direction, the volume of a flow's
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Tao PEI, Hua SHU, Sihui GUO, Ci SONG, Jie CHEN, Yaxi LIU, Xi WANG.
Received: Dec. 1, 2019
Accepted: --
Published Online: Sep. 16, 2020
The Author Email: PEI Tao (peit@lreis.ac.cn)