Field (geography)

In the context of spatial analysis, geographic information systems, and geographic information science, the term field has been adopted from physics, in which it denotes a quantity that can be theoretically assigned to any point of space, such as temperature or density. This use of field is synonymous with the spatially dependent variable that forms the foundation of geostatistics and crossbreeding between these disciplines is common. Both scalar and vector fields are found in geographic applications, although the former is more common. The simplest formal model for a field is the function, which yields a single value given a point in space (i.e., t = f(x, y, z) ) In the context of spatial analysis, geographic information systems, and geographic information science, the term field has been adopted from physics, in which it denotes a quantity that can be theoretically assigned to any point of space, such as temperature or density. This use of field is synonymous with the spatially dependent variable that forms the foundation of geostatistics and crossbreeding between these disciplines is common. Both scalar and vector fields are found in geographic applications, although the former is more common. The simplest formal model for a field is the function, which yields a single value given a point in space (i.e., t = f(x, y, z) )