CBI researcher, Antonio Medrano, had an article published by PLOS.org today. The article discusses the impacts that data representations have and how they may or may not distort outcomes. The article focuses on two common spatial data preparations: 1) the connectivity of the network generated by connecting raster cells to their neighbors, and 2) the range of the attribute scale for assigning costs. Such analyses involve locating a linear feature by performing shortest path analysis on raster terrain data and are commonly used to locate transmission lines, where the results could have major implications on project cost and environmental impact.
