introduction

[Paul W. Box]

Hello Swarm Team

My name is Paul Box, I am a graduate student in geography at the
University of Florida in the Cartographic Research Laboratory in Applied
Geography. We have just been added to the swarm beta test list, and I
would like to give a brief introduction about who we are and how we
would like to use swarm.

I am in the latter stages of a doctoral dissertation on recreational
boat traffic in Sarasota Bay, Florida. Our lab has taken on a project
that is looking at recommending methodologies of recreational boat
traffic monitoring for local counties and navigation districts.  In that
project much field data was gathered about the resident boat population,
and telephone interviews were conducted with a subset of the boat owners
about their boating habits and preferences.

Since there is almost nothing published about recreational boat traffic
systems, I decided that the best way to approach this was to simulate
boat traffic in a computer.  The population of boats and habits of
boaters are very diverse, so I figured the best way to simulate them was
to simulate individual boats and boaters, turn them loose in a
representation of the bay (represeneted by a GIS coverage), and gather
information from the resultant behavior.  

I have written the earlier versions of this simulation in C++, and had
just completed a detailed redesign of the objects, heirarchies, and
organization of the model, and was ready to start rewriting the base
classes when I was introduced to swarm at the NCGIA conference in Santa
Fe.  I was impressed by the fact that swarm facilitates all of the
assumptions that I was making about the boat traffic system, and decided
it would be greatly worth my while to do the rewrite of my classes in
swarm.

One crucial aspect of this simulation is that is is interacting with the
environment (represented by a GIS coverage) at every time step.  For
that reason, I am interested that there be an interface between swarm
and GIS (I have been using Arc/INFO, but GRASS may be a better choice).
I would especially like to communicate with anyone else who is
integrating swarm with any GIS.

If I write more, this will no longer be a 'brief' introduction.  Thank
you for allowing me into this phase of the beta test, and I look forward
to hearing from you. 
-- 
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/*  Paul Box                      |        Cogito ergo                */
/*  Dept. of Geography            |      Oculum Dioscoreum            */
/*  University of Florida         |                                   */
/*  address@hidden   |     (I think, therefor            */
/*  http://grove.ufl.edu/~sanduku |           eye yam)                */
/*                                |                                   */
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