Antony K Cooper | Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) (original) (raw)
Papers by Antony K Cooper
CSIR Science Scope, Mar 1, 2008
Abstract: Crime mapping can be used at three levels, namely strategic, operational and tactical. ... more Abstract: Crime mapping can be used at three levels, namely strategic, operational and tactical. At the strategic level, crime mapping is used to deploy police resources effectively to combat crime. An example could be where high incidents of crime per police station are ...
This document, "A national standard for the exchange of digital geo-referenced information", was ... more This document, "A national standard for the exchange of digital geo-referenced information", was published in September 1987. This version was created from scanned copies of the original printed document, overlaid with an invisible layer of the text of the document, extracted through optical character recognition. This means that the resulting text can be searched. However, there were many errors in the OCR results, which were fixed manually. The original text was not changed during this editing, so it should match the scanned version, including the spelling and grammatical errors. This document is being made available now because of its historical importance in the development of the geographical information sciences in South Africa; to make available the extensive glossary included in the document; and for anyone interested in the standard, including those wishing to decode a data set encoded according to this standard. Please note that version 2 of this standard was published in November 1990.
Not Available eBooks, 2014
Recently, the CSIR has been involved in two projects investigating information technology (IT) an... more Recently, the CSIR has been involved in two projects investigating information technology (IT) and related processes in the civil and criminal justice systems, one with the Department of Justice focusing on civil justice, and the other as part of a consortium addressing the Integrated Criminal Justice System (ICJS), which also includes the Departments of Welfare and Correctional Services, and the South African Police Service (SAPS). The first was funded by the Innovation Fund of the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (DACST), and had the Department of Justice as a client. This project investigated the current and potential use of IT in court management, specifically regarding the Civil Courts and Special Courts (eg the Labour Court and Land Claims Court). Processes were identified for each different kind of Court, and the current use of IT established. Problems and needs were identified, with special emphasis on IT, but also considering the bigger environment where IT needed to fit in.
Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 1990
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The response of proposed breakwater packing strategies to incident waves is usually tested and ev... more The response of proposed breakwater packing strategies to incident waves is usually tested and evaluated in a model hall. There is currently also increasing interest in using numerical simulations to model both the packing of a breakwater, and its response to storms. In this paper, we test the use of physics engine software, which provides fast modelling of hundreds of units, as a means of gaining insight into damage quantification and breakwater disorder. Both dolosse and Antifer armour units are investigated. An order parameter P 2 is proposed which is shown, using the numerical models, to be a useful measure of orientational order or disorder when the randomness of the packing is in question. A root-mean-square displacement parameter is proposed as a measure of the movement of armour units from their original positions under cyclic forces. Both parameters are easy to use in simulations, and the use of these parameters in model halls and in the field is discussed.
Routledge eBooks, Mar 31, 2022
Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 2020
In this study, we model the risk of robbery in the City of Tshwane in South Africa. We use the co... more 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 future robbery incidents in the city. The model is validated using actual robbery incidences recorded for the city. Overall the model performs reasonably well with approximately 70% of future robbery incidences accurately identified within a small subset of the overall model. Developing countries such as South Africa are in dire need of crime risk intensity models that are simple, and not data intensive to allocate scarce crime prevention resources in a more optimal fashion. It is anticipated that this model is a first step in this regard.
32nd Annual Southern African Transport Conference (SATC 2013), CSIR International Convention Cent... more 32nd Annual Southern African Transport Conference (SATC 2013), CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa, 8-11 July 2013
International …, 2007
The Commission on Spatial Data Standards of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) is w... more The Commission on Spatial 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 ...
Abstracts of the ICA
Land includes not just the surface of the Earth but also the air above and the spaces below (incl... more Land includes not just the surface of the Earth but also the air above and the spaces below (including the oceans, lakes, rivers, and other bodies of water). Land availability can contribute to income, nutrition, health, education, and social services. Many people living on customary lands have insecure access to land, raising the risks of destruction of cultural land-use practices, forced evictions, social conflicts, and poverty. Despite a high-quality cadastre covering South Africa's surveyed or formalized areas, much of the rural population lives in former Bantustans, on land outside of the formal land tenure system. Secure tenure for all tenure types is essential to attaining at least 10 of the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These SDGs are linked to people-to-land relationships; hence the value of land and its administration is widely acknowledged, and is reflected in the SDGs. SDG target 1.4 aims at tenure security for all. This target requires land administration systems that clarify and formalise land rights to promote secure land markets, poverty alleviation, and national development (Bexell and Jönsson, 2017; UN-Habitat, 2018). This demonstrates that the land administration is important for the global development agenda (Jahan et al., 2015; Koeva et al., 2020). Nations prosper with efficient land administration. Reliable land administration enables dynamic land markets and effective land use. It is important that all types of land ownership (public, private, communal, indigenous, customary, and informal) be considered. The modernization drive has dominated land tenure studies, and the standard responses to communal and customary land administration systems reflect this view of them as backwards and antithetical to progress. Urban insecure tenure issues Communal land tenure issues
Advances in Cartography and GIScience of the ICA
Post-conflict reconstruction includes the removal of land mines and remnants of war. The CSIR con... more 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 between 350 to 2500 micrometre. Laboratory analysis such as UPLC qTOF MS indicated that the TNT have an influence on the plants. Several indices such as Modified Red Edge Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (mNDVI705), Red Edge Position (REP) and Moisture Stress Index (MSI) did not show any significant differences between control plants and experimental plants with different TNT concentrations. Groth's pattern matching algorithm designed to match several photographs of the same part of the universe. A set of triangles using dominant stars are created for each photograph and matched using an error band. If the selected triangles from the two photographs fit within the error band, then they are from the same section of the universe. Bands for the Pléiades instruments were simulated using the data from the spectrometer for each plant. The reflectance value of the band and the normalised midpoint wavelength of each Pléiades band were used to construct the triangles. The control plant triangle is then matched with the experimental plant and if the triangles do not match, then the effect of TNT on the plant is significant. The initial results with the control plants and experimental plants are positive.
CSIR Science Scope, Mar 1, 2008
Abstract: Crime mapping can be used at three levels, namely strategic, operational and tactical. ... more Abstract: Crime mapping can be used at three levels, namely strategic, operational and tactical. At the strategic level, crime mapping is used to deploy police resources effectively to combat crime. An example could be where high incidents of crime per police station are ...
This document, "A national standard for the exchange of digital geo-referenced information", was ... more This document, "A national standard for the exchange of digital geo-referenced information", was published in September 1987. This version was created from scanned copies of the original printed document, overlaid with an invisible layer of the text of the document, extracted through optical character recognition. This means that the resulting text can be searched. However, there were many errors in the OCR results, which were fixed manually. The original text was not changed during this editing, so it should match the scanned version, including the spelling and grammatical errors. This document is being made available now because of its historical importance in the development of the geographical information sciences in South Africa; to make available the extensive glossary included in the document; and for anyone interested in the standard, including those wishing to decode a data set encoded according to this standard. Please note that version 2 of this standard was published in November 1990.
Not Available eBooks, 2014
Recently, the CSIR has been involved in two projects investigating information technology (IT) an... more Recently, the CSIR has been involved in two projects investigating information technology (IT) and related processes in the civil and criminal justice systems, one with the Department of Justice focusing on civil justice, and the other as part of a consortium addressing the Integrated Criminal Justice System (ICJS), which also includes the Departments of Welfare and Correctional Services, and the South African Police Service (SAPS). The first was funded by the Innovation Fund of the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (DACST), and had the Department of Justice as a client. This project investigated the current and potential use of IT in court management, specifically regarding the Civil Courts and Special Courts (eg the Labour Court and Land Claims Court). Processes were identified for each different kind of Court, and the current use of IT established. Problems and needs were identified, with special emphasis on IT, but also considering the bigger environment where IT needed to fit in.
Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 1990
RefDoc Bienvenue - Welcome. Refdoc est un service / is powered by. ...
The response of proposed breakwater packing strategies to incident waves is usually tested and ev... more The response of proposed breakwater packing strategies to incident waves is usually tested and evaluated in a model hall. There is currently also increasing interest in using numerical simulations to model both the packing of a breakwater, and its response to storms. In this paper, we test the use of physics engine software, which provides fast modelling of hundreds of units, as a means of gaining insight into damage quantification and breakwater disorder. Both dolosse and Antifer armour units are investigated. An order parameter P 2 is proposed which is shown, using the numerical models, to be a useful measure of orientational order or disorder when the randomness of the packing is in question. A root-mean-square displacement parameter is proposed as a measure of the movement of armour units from their original positions under cyclic forces. Both parameters are easy to use in simulations, and the use of these parameters in model halls and in the field is discussed.
Routledge eBooks, Mar 31, 2022
Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 2020
In this study, we model the risk of robbery in the City of Tshwane in South Africa. We use the co... more 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 future robbery incidents in the city. The model is validated using actual robbery incidences recorded for the city. Overall the model performs reasonably well with approximately 70% of future robbery incidences accurately identified within a small subset of the overall model. Developing countries such as South Africa are in dire need of crime risk intensity models that are simple, and not data intensive to allocate scarce crime prevention resources in a more optimal fashion. It is anticipated that this model is a first step in this regard.
32nd Annual Southern African Transport Conference (SATC 2013), CSIR International Convention Cent... more 32nd Annual Southern African Transport Conference (SATC 2013), CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa, 8-11 July 2013
International …, 2007
The Commission on Spatial Data Standards of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) is w... more The Commission on Spatial 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 ...
Abstracts of the ICA
Land includes not just the surface of the Earth but also the air above and the spaces below (incl... more Land includes not just the surface of the Earth but also the air above and the spaces below (including the oceans, lakes, rivers, and other bodies of water). Land availability can contribute to income, nutrition, health, education, and social services. Many people living on customary lands have insecure access to land, raising the risks of destruction of cultural land-use practices, forced evictions, social conflicts, and poverty. Despite a high-quality cadastre covering South Africa's surveyed or formalized areas, much of the rural population lives in former Bantustans, on land outside of the formal land tenure system. Secure tenure for all tenure types is essential to attaining at least 10 of the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These SDGs are linked to people-to-land relationships; hence the value of land and its administration is widely acknowledged, and is reflected in the SDGs. SDG target 1.4 aims at tenure security for all. This target requires land administration systems that clarify and formalise land rights to promote secure land markets, poverty alleviation, and national development (Bexell and Jönsson, 2017; UN-Habitat, 2018). This demonstrates that the land administration is important for the global development agenda (Jahan et al., 2015; Koeva et al., 2020). Nations prosper with efficient land administration. Reliable land administration enables dynamic land markets and effective land use. It is important that all types of land ownership (public, private, communal, indigenous, customary, and informal) be considered. The modernization drive has dominated land tenure studies, and the standard responses to communal and customary land administration systems reflect this view of them as backwards and antithetical to progress. Urban insecure tenure issues Communal land tenure issues
Advances in Cartography and GIScience of the ICA
Post-conflict reconstruction includes the removal of land mines and remnants of war. The CSIR con... more 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 between 350 to 2500 micrometre. Laboratory analysis such as UPLC qTOF MS indicated that the TNT have an influence on the plants. Several indices such as Modified Red Edge Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (mNDVI705), Red Edge Position (REP) and Moisture Stress Index (MSI) did not show any significant differences between control plants and experimental plants with different TNT concentrations. Groth's pattern matching algorithm designed to match several photographs of the same part of the universe. A set of triangles using dominant stars are created for each photograph and matched using an error band. If the selected triangles from the two photographs fit within the error band, then they are from the same section of the universe. Bands for the Pléiades instruments were simulated using the data from the spectrometer for each plant. The reflectance value of the band and the normalised midpoint wavelength of each Pléiades band were used to construct the triangles. The control plant triangle is then matched with the experimental plant and if the triangles do not match, then the effect of TNT on the plant is significant. The initial results with the control plants and experimental plants are positive.
Traditionally, humans used an address as a direction to a building and its occupants. The advent ... more 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 parts of the world, such as referencing to a road network or to a hierarchy of administrative areas; in informal settlements addresses can be informal, variable and creative. Addresses are used for a wide variety of purposes, often with conflicting needs, such as required geographical precision and accuracy. Various stakeholders are involved in both designing and maintaining an addressing scheme, including town planners, city managers, utility companies, postal operators and addressees. Some countries and international organizations have address standards and there is a process within the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) looking at bringing them together into a suite of international standards for addressing. In this paper we present a number of issues that have to be considered when designing an addressing scheme. Drawing on these, we show that there is a trade-off between people, the physical world and its digital representation when designing an addressing scheme. Based on these findings, we list a number of good principles for the design of a national addressing scheme.
Planning Africa 2016, 2016
The Western Cape Province is currently faced with population growth, declining household sizes, i... more 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 poor, limited public access to resources, land degradation and climate change. This paper seeks to understand the most significant drivers of LULC change in the Western Cape Province. Focus is given to the major LULC changes which have occurred in the Province in past 24 years by integrating a desktop study of LULC changes using the 1990 and 2013-2014 South African National LULC datasets; document analysis; and expert opinion in the form of semi-structured interviews with municipal town planners. An adapted Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) Framework is used to analyse and understand LULC changes in the study area. LULC changes are driven by political, economic, technological, demographic, biophysical and cultural factors that must be considered in strategies and policies in future planning to avoid detrimental impacts on the environment whilst maintaining socioeconomic benefits.
This thesis presents an analysis of the nature of volunteered geographical information (VGI) and ... more This thesis presents an analysis of the nature of volunteered geographical information (VGI) and on its applicability for use in a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) to supplement official and commercial sources, particularly given the ease with which ordinary people can document their environment, experiences, perspectives and prejudices, share them widely and rapidly, and even query anyone else’s content. For this research, taxonomies and repositories of such information were examined qualitatively and using formal concept analysis (FCA). Further, this thesis attempts to reflect on the context for SDIs and VGI and the challenges and opportunities for both.
An SDI is an evolving concept for facilitating and coordinating the management and sharing of geospatial data, with services, metadata, products, standards and inter-organisation arrangements and structures. It can take long to establish an SDI; some have failed and they have competition. In South Africa, the National Development Plan has an objective to establish a national spatial observatory: it is part of an SDI with its own value-add data, and products provided through the SDI or directly to its participants. The Spatial Data Infrastructure Act established the South African Spatial Data Infrastructure and its Committee for Spatial Information.
Creating vast quantities of user-generated content (UGC) has been enabled by the pervasiveness, power and affordability of inter-networking, social media, virtual communities, applications and mobile devices. VGI is user-generated content with geospatial components, or user-generated geospatial content.
VGI can contribute successfully to an SDI, at the local, national, regional or global level. VGI can extend the reach in time and space of official mapping agencies and others contributing to an SDI, because of the sheer volume of humans and their devices acting together or independently, as sensors, recorders and disseminators. VGI; repositories of VGI; innovative integration of content, applications and services (mashups); crowd sourcing and new geographical theories (psychogeography, social theory, social justice, ethics, etc) all challenge the traditional business models of SDIs.
However, metadata, quality, classification and standards can be challenges for VGI. Further, while some VGI can be useful, other VGI can be spurious, misleading or wrong. There are also different interpretations over what is actually VGI.
To provide context for the exposition, this thesis also examines terminology, geospatial data, classification, folksonomies, virtual globes, inter-networking, the limitations of the Internet, controlling the Internet, privacy, exploiting content, social media, curation, the digital divide, citizen science, crowd sourcing, neogeography, metadata, quality, standards and formal concept analysis (FCA). To determine the nature of VGI and its suitability for an SDI, this thesis investigates various taxonomies of UGC, VGI and citizen science; assesses qualitatively their discrimination adequacy using VGI repositories; and assesses them using FCA.
This thesis also presents original research contributions, to information science, geographical information science and theoretical computer science. For FCA it presents lemmas on stability in a lattice (providing lower and upper bounds for intensional and extensional stability indices), it shows there is value in instability in a lattice when assessing a taxonomy (representing extreme values rather than noise) and it presents stability exploration, a possible decision support tool. It describes the four stages for recognising the quality of a resource, it reports on a survey of geographical information professionals on VGI, SDIs and virtual globes, and it clarifies the differences between UGC, VGI, citizen science, crowd sourcing and neogeography, which can be confused with one another. Finally, this thesis explains why the Internet cannot be controlled.