A method of spatio-temporally integrating shop/office information including names and locations is developed and applied to whole Japan. A typical example of such shop/office information is a telephone directory. If we can integrate these data of different years spatio-temporally, i.e. identify whether a shop/office at a specific location in a specific year is identical or not with a shop/office in the different years at the same location, we can map the changes and continuation of shops/offices in an entire city or region. The spatio-temporal integration method includes; 1) a geo-coding method at the floor level of a building, 2) a method of identifying shop/office names considering geographic names that appears very frequently at a specific local area. The method is validated in several study areas and finally applied to entire Japan.

This study explores the relationship between neighborhood's social capital and burglary victimization by using mail survey data conducted in the urban area of Japan. We examined how crime control effects of social capital vary, depending on changing of geographical range of the “neighborhood” used in the analyses, from 60 to 500 meters in 10 meter increments. We summarize the results as follows: (1) for trust, norms of reciprocity and the principal component score of the social capital index, the larger geographical ranges of “neighborhood” used in analyses are, the stronger their crime control effects are; (2) social participation doesn't have significant crime control effects; (3) trust shows strong crime control effects even in narrow geographical ranges. These findings suggest that there may be multiple crime control mechanisms through social capital in a certain geographical range of the neighborhood.

A proto type of real-time monitoring and predicting system for a shallow landslide hazard during heavy rainfall in Japan, the system with Soil Water Index Normalized by Greatest-value (SWING system), is being developed. The system is based on empirical two rainfall patterns associated with shallow landslide initiation: short-duration, high-intensity (SH) and long-duration, low-intensity (LL) types. The system classifies present rainfall into SH and LL types using Radar/Raingauge-Analyzed Precipitation and Soil Water Index provided by the Japan Meteorological Agency. We verified the system by monitoring the major rainfall-induced shallow landslide disasters of July 2010 in the southern part of Kyushu, Yaotsu town in Gifu pref., and Shobara city in Hiroshima pref. Results showed that we succeeded in monitoring and predicting SH and LL types as the conditions likely to initiate shallow landslide in the place. Verification also underscored the need for some additional development. The system will be useful for real-time shallow landslide warnings, which should be modified and verified using more case studies.

The topographic index (TI) plays a key role in TOPMODEL which is a conceptual rainfall-runoff model of small river basins. The TI, depending in each point of the catchment upon local stream slope and upslope contributing drainage area, is usually computed from a regular raster digital elevation model (DEM). Many studies have shown that the TI distribution is largely affected by the DEM resolution; for example, the mean of TI increases when the DEM resolution decreases, i.e. with coarser cell sizes and this shift leads to larger calibrated transmissivities and saturated hydraulic conductivities. We propose a simple explanation to the shift by using the fractal characteristics of river basins; the probability distribution of contribution area shows a good agreement with a power law form, and the plot of mean slope versus contribution area also has a power law scaling. Combining these two relations together, we obtain a new formula between the shift of the TI distribution and the DEM resolution. We also examine how the TI distribution deviates from the power law.

Development and update of geospatial information by public sectors, such as "Integrated GIS" or "Digital National Land Information", has been conducted since in the late 1990's. Moreover, "Basic Act on Promotion of Utilization of Geographical Information (NSDI Law)", which was legislated in 2007, leads us to the second stage. On the other hands, local governments as service providers to residents are forced to restructure their services because of tight budget and staff reduction, in spite of decentralization. Considering this situation, it will be necessary to objectively evaluate their status of information provision through web site using map, based on the objective evidence. In this study, we collect information of web site providing web map service thorough the Internet in all local governments by visual confirmation. Moreover, we give qualitative and quantitative analysis of service level, and publish the list data of all web sites, contributing to various analyses or policy makings by various people.

Spatial unit convergence, called areal interpolation, is often applied to address this problem. Of the many areal interpolation methods that have been proposed, a few consider spatial autocorrelation which is the general property of spatial data. Here, a new areal interpolation method that considers spatial autocorrelation is constructed by combining linear regression based areal interpolation method and kriging: a spatial statistical method. The proposed method, whose implementation and extension is easy, is practical among spatial statistics based areal interpolation methods. Then, a case study showed that the suggested method succeeds in improving the predictive accuracy and indicated that considering spatial autocorrelation is important for accurate areal interpolation.

The aim of this paper is to examine regional differences in the prevalence of pollinosis by social area type in a geodemographics dataset by carrying out binomial logistic regression analysis on the 2002-2006 Japanese General Social Surveys (JGSS) data. The results indicate that people living in rural areas and working in the agriculture and forestry industries are less prone to contracting pollinosis, and people with a higher household income have a higher risk of contracting the disease compared to those with a lower household income. These findings are consistent with the hygiene hypothesis that sanitary environments impair normal development of immunity and increase the risk of contracting allergic diseases. This study also exemplifies the usefulness of geodemographics as a concise indicator of the local environment for explanatory analysis of environmental health risks of pollinosis.

This paper aims to build a spatiotemporal GIS database about boundaries of municipalities. The municipality is most popular spatial unit used for statistical data in Japan. However, because the boundaries of the municipalities often change, it is difficult to compare statistical data in two time points. This database allows us to obtain the boundary GIS data of municipalities at any given time point after 1970 and the correspondence table of municipalities between two time points through the web-based interface of this database. This database, named “Municipality Map Maker for Web (MMM4W)”, facilitates the GIS analysis using the statistical data by municipalities with a temporal dimension.