Journal of the Korean Geographical Society ISSN:1225-6633(Print) 대한지리학회지

Surface data generally represent continuous distribution of geographical or social phenomena of a region in urban analysis. Instances include distribution of temperature, population of region, and various distributions related to human activities. When spatial data are given in the form of surface, surface comparison is required as a way of comprehending the surface change or the relationship between two surfaces. As for previous approaches of surface comparison, there are visualization, quantitative methods and qualitative method. All those approaches, however, show the difference between two surfaces in a limited way. Especially, they are not able to distinguish spatial difference between two surfaces. To overcome such problem, this paper proposes a method of comparing two surfaces in terms of their spatial structure. Main concept of the method comes from earth moving problem and the method is named minimum surface transformation, here. When a surface is transformed into another, total surface volume moved in the process of transformation should be the minimum. Both quantitative and spatial differences between two surfaces are evaluted by total surface volume moved and the distribution of moved surface volume of each cell respectively. The method is applied to hypothetical and actual data. From the former, it is understood that the method explains how two surfaces are quantitatively and spatially different. The result of the latter shows that moved total surface volume decreases as time goes by which fits the actual situation that population change rate gets smaller. Concerning the other measure of surface difference, the distribution of Xij describes detailed flow of surface volume than that of simply subtracting surface volume by indicating to what direction the population change occurs.