Analysis & Modeling

The aim of this course was that each student works on an own small project. My work had the title „Fuzzy Classification in GIS“.

The natural language is an often used medium for the communication of information. For the technical processing of such knowledge transmitted using natural language is it neccessary to transform this knowledge into formalized information. The usage of methods from the field of Fuzzy Logic enables the handling with such fuzzy formulations. Fuzzy Logic makes it possible to assign an element only to a certain part to a specific set, respectively is it also possible that an element is assigned to more sets with different degrees. Also in the field of Geograhpy are Fuzzy Methods often used to handle fuzzy statements and data sets.

The concrete practical exaple of my work was to find appropriate areas for alpine pastures in the Osterhorngruppe (Austria). In the linguistical formulation of the problem statemet there are terms like „flat“ and „southern“. The figure above shows the membership function for a „southern hillshade“. „Southern“ lies between East (= 90°) and West (= 270°), and has its highest membership exactly in the South (= 180°).

The focus of this works was beside the theoretical introduction into Fuzzy Logic, how to handly such fuzzy terms in GIS using Fuzzy Classification. The result is shown in the map above, where the green areas are the good regions for alpine pastures.