On the Information Content of Regional Maps

Regionalization is one of the traditional tasks of geographers. The word means here the partitioning of a territory into quasi-homogeneous cells. For the most part, classical geographers used their intuition and very few variables to delimit regions. These variables usually were not precisely defined, nor were they measured on a broad scale; they could take only a few different values. Modern geographers use multivariate analysis under its different forms, which leads to a dramatic increase in the number of variables used, and in the complexity and power of the methods. Numerical taxonomy based on a preliminary components analysis in order to treat uncorrelated variables has been classic in the United States for twenty years; it is becoming the most prevalent quantitative method used by geographers in continental Europe. A rapid evaluation of the results, however, leads to startling conclusions. Regionalization based on multivariate analysis has been disappointing. Some geographers seem to have a good point when they argue that classical regionalization leads to similar results with very rough tools and fewer variables. If the goal pursued is only the production of a regional map, it seems this can be achieved by an elementary knowledge of the phenomena and some good sense, instead of large data matrices. One wonders where all the information has gone? To answer such a puzzling question, this article tries to estimate the information treated at the various steps of a numerical taxonomy, and at the final step, in each elementary regional cell (OTU). The word information refers here to the basic concept of information heory as measured by the entropy of a probability distribution; the var ous kinds of used in this text have been defined elsewhere [2]. Th concept of geographical redundancy is newly introduced

Content (measure theory) · Economic geography · Geography · Redundancy (engineering) · Regional science · Computer Science · Global Trade and Competitiveness · Mathematics

• Perception and Maps

  C Board, Rosanne M Taylor•Transactions of the Institute of…•1977

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• Information Theory

  Open Access•James A Walsh, M Webber et al.•Environment and Planning A…•1977

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