Abstract
The paper describes the SimUrb tool, which was used to calculate the similarity between municipalities (or other territorial units) according to several characteristics (attributes). The SimUrb tool allows similar groups between ordered sequences to be found. The tool was designed to work with hundreds of records. In order to find similar groups, the tool employs graph theory, in which similar groups are represented as cliques on a simple graph. The Bron-Kerbosch algorithm was used to search for them. The degree of similarity was determined from a metric based on the Euclidean distance between strings. Finding all non-trivial cliques would have been difficult or impossible for such data to be feasible in this study. Therefore, the SimUrb tool was used to find similar groups as the largest disjoint cliques in the respective graph. A case study is introduced in the second part of the paper to illustrate SimUrb’s functionality. The results of standard grouping methods (two methods offered by ArcGIS software) and groups defined under official planning documents were compared to the results from the SimUrb software. We concluded that SimUrb can be used in many applications where the user needs to define groups of objects with the same degree of similarity.
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Data Availability
SimUrb was created in PHP, HTML and C# programming languages, and graphical visualization was done with the D3.js and jQuery libraries. The tool is located on the server of Palacký University, Olomouc (web-n.upol.cz). For public users, the tool is accessible at http://eyetracking.upol.cz/simurb. The server runs on Linux OS with an Apache 2.0 web server, PHP version 5.3.17 and MySQL database version 5.0.8. Complete configuration of the server is available at http://eyetracking.upol.cz/info.php.
Preparation of the geographic data for SimUrb was done in open source software QGIS version 2.18. All tools were tested for use mainly in the Google Chrome web browser. The SimUrb source code is available at: https://github.com/swenney/simurb.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Czech Science Foundation, project no. 19-14506S; and by the NAKI II research programme, project no. DG18P02OVV017. We would like to thank Ondřej Štrubl, who did the programming part of the work.
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Communicated by: H. Babaie
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Doležalová, J., Burian, J. & Popelka, S. SimUrb – software for identifying similar municipalities by comparing Urban indices using a graph algorithm. Earth Sci Inform 12, 699–714 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-019-00399-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-019-00399-8