Suchergebnisse

The National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) is defined as the technologies, policies and people necessary to promote sharing of geospatial data throughout all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors and the academic community. The US Census Bureau is the federal agency lead for administrative units data, one of the seven data themes identified by the NSDI framework. The administrative unit is a unit with administrative responsibilities. These units are organized as nodes/lines/areas feature data. The OpenGIS Geography Markup Language (GML) is the XML grammar to express the geographic features. This study at the US Census Bureau investigates how the general-purpose GML standard could be leveraged and extended to describe the most comprehensive geographic dataset with national coverage in the US. Challenges and problems in dealing with data volume, GML document structure, GML schema design and GML document naming are analyzed, followed by proposed solutions proven for feasibility. Our results show that one key point in making a successful GML deployment for NSDI is to reflect the characteristics of the geographic data through a carefully designed GML schema, structure and organization. The lessons learned may be useful to others transforming NSDI framework data and other large geospatial datasets into GML structures.

Being an important aspect of sustainable development, sustainable consumption has attracted great attention among Chinese politicians and academia, and Chinese governments have established policies that encourage sustainable consumption behaviors. However, unsustainable consumption behavior still remains predominant in China. This paper aims to classify consumers with similar traits, in terms of the characteristics of practicing sustainable consumption, into one group, so that their traits can be clearly understood, to enable governments to establish pointed policies for different groups of consumers. Q methodology, generally used to reveal the subjectivity of human beings involved in any situation, is applied in this paper to classify Chinese consumers based on Q sample design and data collection and analysis. Next, the traits of each group are analyzed in detail and comparison analyses are also conducted to compare the common and differentiating factors among the three groups. The results show that Chinese consumers can be classified into three groups: sustainable (Group 1), potential sustainable (Group 2) and unsustainable consumers (Group 3), according to their values and attitudes towards sustainable consumption. As such, Group 1 cares for the environment and has strong environmental values. They understand sustainable consumption and its functions. Group 2 needs more enlightenments and external stimuli to motivate them to consume sustainably. Group 3 needs to be informed about and educated on sustainable consumption to enable them to change their consumption behavior from unsustainable to sustainable. Suggestions and implications of encouraging each group of consumers to engage in sustainable consumption are also provided.