Beijing is one of the most developed cities in China and has experienced a series of environmental problems. In accordance with the Major Function Zone planning, Beijing is divided into four zones in an attempt to coordinate development between urban areas and the eco-environment. Classic coupling model uses statistical data to evaluate the interactions of these two subsystems; however, it lacks the capability to express dynamic changes to land cover. Thus, we extracted land cover data from Landsat images and examined the urbanization and eco-environment level as well as the coupling coordination in Beijing and its functional zones. The main conclusions are as follows. (1) Between 2001 and 2011, both urbanization and the eco-environment level in Beijing and its functional zones grew steadily. Different zones coordinated together according to their own characteristics, and the overall coupling coordination of the city transformed from the “basically balanced” to the “superiorly balanced” stage of development. (2) After 2011, the condition of the eco-environment worsened in Beijing and in most of the function zones, while the coordination between increased urbanization and the worsened eco-environment may be a result of environmental lag. This study integrated land cover data into the coupling mode and fully utilized the advantages of spatiotemporal analysis and the coupling model. In other words, the spatiotemporal analysis explains the land cover changes visually over the research period, while the coupling model explores the interaction mechanisms between urbanization and the eco-environment. The land cover data enriches the coupling theory and provides a reference for evaluating the effectiveness of local development policy.

Traditional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) represent the environment under reductionist thinking, which disaggregates a geographic environment into independent geographic themes. The reductionist approach makes the spatiotemporal characteristics of geo-features explicit, but neglects the holistic nature of the environment, such as the hierarchical structure and interactions among environmental elements. To fill this gap, we integrate the concept geographic scenario with the fundamental principles of General System Theory to realize the environmental complexity in GIS. With the integration, a geographic scenario constitutes a hierarchy of spatiotemporal frameworks for organizing environmental elements and subserving the exploration of their relationships. Furthermore, we propose geo-characterization with ontological commitments to both static and dynamic properties of a geographic scenario and prescribe spatial, temporal, semantic, interactive, and causal relationships among environmental elements. We have tested the utility of the proposed representation in OWL and the associated reasoning process in Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules in a case study in Nanjing, China. The case study represents Nanjing and the Nanjing presidential palace to demonstrate the connections among environmental elements in different scenarios and the support for information queries, evolution process simulation, and semantic inferences. The proposed representation encodes geographic knowledge of the environment, makes the interactions among environmental elements explicit, supports geographic process simulation, opens opportunities for deep knowledge mining, and grounds a foundation for GeoAI to discover geographic complexity and dynamics beyond the support of conventional theme-centric inquiries in GIS.

Dividing abstract object sets into multiple groups, called clustering, is essential for effective data mining. Clustering can find innate but unknown real-world knowledge that is inaccessible by any other means. Rodriguez and Laio have published a paper about a density-based fast clustering algorithm in Science called CFSFDP. CFSFDP is a highly efficient algorithm that clusters objects by using fast searching of density peaks. But with CFSFDP, the essential second step of finding clustering centers must be done manually. Furthermore, when the amount of data objects increases or a decision graph is complicated, determining clustering centers manually is difficult and time consuming, and clustering accuracy reduces sharply. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an improved clustering algorithm, ACDPC, that is based on data detection, which can automatically determinate clustering centers without manual intervention. First, the algorithm calculates the comprehensive metrics and sorts them based on the CFSFDP method. Second, the distance between the sorted objects is used to judge whether they are the correct clustering centers. Finally, the remaining objects are grouped into clusters. This algorithm can efficiently and automatically determine clustering centers without calculating additional variables. We verified ACDPC using three standard datasets and compared it with other clustering algorithms. The experimental results show that ACDPC is more efficient and robust than alternative methods.