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comprehensive images of particular areas. Area informatics rather focuses on
humanities' side of area studies: by applying informatics methods, area informatics
tries to build frameworks of organizing resources, quantifying qualitative data,
integrating them with quantitative data from natural and technological sides of area
studies, analyzing whole data sets, and finally constructing comprehensive, objective
and reproducible images of particular areas.
However, qualitative data sets of area studies are too diverse to treat everything
from the beginning, and this is the reason why area informatics begun focusing on
time and space attributes. Spatiotemporal perspectives form a common basis for
humanities: time and place are a few quantitative attributes that are familiar to
humanities and relatively easy to be derived from humanities' resources, and
accordingly a huge amount of knowledge about how to use spatiotemporal attributes
explicitly and implicitly has been accumulated in the fields. In the past, quantitative
approaches to using spatiotemporal attributes were not popular in humanities, because
appropriate methods and tools to describe and process these attributes were not
matured. Recently, circumstances have gradually changed due to the dissemination
and development of excellent and free software such as GIS (Geographic Information
Systems/Sciences) tools, digital maps, digital gazetteers, and metadata that treat
spatiotemporal attributes appropriately.
The Humanities GIS Research Group (H-GIS) [1] is a leading interdisciplinary
research group in Japan to develop and apply spatiotemporal informatics to
humanities. The H-GIS was originally established voluntarily by researchers from a
variety of fields including information, engineering, history, literature, geography,
health science, and ecology. Later, the H-GIS was reestablished as a research group
under the Joint Research Project organized by the Center for Integrated Area Studies
(CIAS) [2] Kyoto University, and has focused its efforts on area studies. Dialoguing
between humanities and information researchers to make mutual consensus, and
studying information engineering technologies such as GIS, GPS (Global Positioning
System), RS (Remote Sensing), database, metadata, and ontology and so on, the H-
GIS has developed many databases, Resource Sharing Systems to integrate databases
on the Internet, spatiotemporal tools called HuMap and HuTime, and some ontology
dictionaries about places and dates.
In this paper, current situations of spatiotemporal informatics in area studies will
be summed up, and then H-GIS outcomes will be introduced as an example of
applying spatiotemporal informatics to area studies. Chapter 2 introduces two
information models proposed by the H-GIS and explains the concept and structure of
area informatics, chapter 3 explains Resource Sharing Systems, chapter 4 overviews
some spatiotemporal tools, and chapter 5 briefly introduces ontology databases.
Finally, status of area studies is summarized and future directions especially related to
ontology are considered in chapter 6.
2 Information Models for Area Informatics
Following chapters describe some outcomes accomplished by the H-GIS. First, this
chapter introduces two information models. One is the schematic model that
organizes an overall image of area informatics from data, information and knowledge
