Background Better geographical accessibility to comprehensive emergency obstetric care (CEmOC) facilities can significantly improve pregnancy outcomes. However, with other factors, such as affordability critical for care access, it is important to explore accessibility across groups. We assessed CEmOC geographical accessibility by wealth status in the 15 most-populated Nigerian cities. Methods We mapped city boundaries, verified and geocoded functional CEmOC facilities, and assembled population distribution for women of childbearing age and Meta’s Relative Wealth Index (RWI). We used the Google Maps Platform’s internal Directions Application Programming Interface to obtain driving times to public and private facilities. City-level median travel time (MTT) and number of CEmOC facilities reachable within 60 min were summarised for peak and non-peak hours per wealth quintile. The correlation between RWI and MTT to the nearest public CEmOC was calculated. Results We show that MTT to the nearest public CEmOC facility is lowest in the wealthiest 20% in all cities, with the largest difference in MTT between the wealthiest 20% and least wealthy 20% seen in Onitsha (26 vs 81 min) and the smallest in Warri (20 vs 30 min). Similarly, the average number of public CEmOC facilities reachable within 60 min varies (11 among the wealthiest 20% and six among the least wealthy in Kano). In five cities, zero facilities are reachable under 60 min for the least wealthy 20%. Those who live in the suburbs particularly have poor accessibility to CEmOC facilities. Conclusions Our findings show that the least wealthy mostly have poor accessibility to care. Interventions addressing CEmOC geographical accessibility targeting poor people are needed to address inequities in urban settings.

BackgroundBetter accessibility for emergency obstetric care facilities can substantially reduce maternal and perinatal deaths. However, pregnant women and girls living in urban settings face additional complex challenges travelling to facilities. We aimed to assess the geographical accessibility of the three nearest functional public and private comprehensive emergency obstetric care facilities in the 15 largest Nigerian cities via a novel approach that uses closer-to-reality travel time estimates than traditional model-based approaches.MethodsIn this population-based spatial analysis, we mapped city boundaries, verified and geocoded functional comprehensive emergency obstetric care facilities, and mapped the population distribution for girls and women aged 15–49 years (ie, of childbearing age). We used the Google Maps Platform's internal Directions Application Programming Interface to derive driving times to public and private facilities. Median travel time and the percentage of women aged 15–49 years able to reach care were summarised for eight traffic scenarios (peak and non-peak hours on weekdays and weekends) by city and within city under different travel time thresholds (≤15 min, ≤30 min, ≤60 min).FindingsAs of 2022, there were 11·5 million girls and women aged 15–49 years living in the 15 studied cities, and we identified the location and functionality of 2020 comprehensive emergency obstetric care facilities. City-level median travel time to the nearest comprehensive emergency obstetric care facility ranged from 18 min in Maiduguri to 46 min in Kaduna. Median travel time varied by location within a city. The between-ward IQR of median travel time to the nearest public comprehensive emergency obstetric care varied from the narrowest in Maiduguri (10 min) to the widest in Benin City (41 min). Informal settlements and peripheral areas tended to be worse off compared to the inner city. The percentages of girls and women aged 15–49 years within 60 min of their nearest public comprehensive emergency obstetric care ranged from 83% in Aba to 100% in Maiduguri, while the percentage within 30 min ranged from 33% in Aba to over 95% in Ilorin and Maiduguri. During peak traffic times, the median number of public comprehensive emergency obstetric care facilities reachable by women aged 15–49 years under 30 min was zero in eight (53%) of 15 cities.InterpretationBetter access to comprehensive emergency obstetric care is needed in Nigerian cities and solutions need to be tailored to context. The innovative approach used in this study provides more context-specific, finer, and policy-relevant evidence to support targeted efforts aimed at improving comprehensive emergency obstetric care geographical accessibility in urban Africa.FundingGoogle.

Google Maps Directions Application Programming Interface (the API) and AccessMod tools are increasingly being used to estimate travel time to healthcare. However, no formal comparison of estimates from the tools has been conducted. We modelled and compared median travel time (MTT) to comprehensive emergency obstetric care (CEmOC) using both tools in three Nigerian conurbations (Kano, Port-Harcourt, and Lagos). We compiled spatial layers of CEmOC healthcare facilities, road network, elevation, and land cover and used a least-cost path algorithm within AccessMod to estimate MTT to the nearest CEmOC facility. Comparable MTT estimates were extracted using the API for peak and non-peak travel scenarios. We investigated the relationship between MTT estimates generated by both tools at raster celllevel (0.6 km resolution). We also aggregated the raster cell estimates to generate administratively relevant ward-level MTT. We compared ward-level estimates and identified wards within the same conurbation falling into different 15-minute incremental categories (<15/15-30/30-45/45-60/+60). Of the 189, 101 and 375 wards, 72.0%, 72.3% and 90.1% were categorised in the same 15- minute category in Kano, Port-Harcourt, and Lagos, respectively. Concordance decreased in wards with longer MTT. AccessMod MTT were longer than the API's in areas with ≥45min. At the raster cell-level, MTT had a strong positive correlation (≥0.8) in all conurbations. Adjusted R2 from a linear model (0.624-0.723) was high, increasing marginally in a piecewise linear model (0.677-0.807). In conclusion, at <45-minutes, ward-level estimates from the API and AccessMod are marginally different, however, at longer travel times substantial differences exist, which are amenable to conversion factors.

Travel time estimation accounting for on-the-ground realities between the location where a need for emergency obstetric care (EmOC) arises and the health facility capable of providing EmOC is essential for improving pregnancy outcomes. Current understanding of travel time to care is inadequate in many urban areas of Africa, where short distances obscure long travel times and travel times can vary by time of day and road conditions. Here, we describe a database of travel times to comprehensive EmOC facilities in the 15 most populated extended urban areas of Nigeria. The travel times from cells of approximately 0.6 × 0.6 km to facilities were derived from Google Maps Platform’s internal Directions Application Programming Interface, which incorporates traffic considerations to provide closer-to-reality travel time estimates. Computations were done to the first, second and third nearest public or private facilities. Travel time for eight traffic scenarios (including peak and non-peak periods) and number of facilities within specific time thresholds were estimated. The database offers a plethora of opportunities for research and planning towards improving EmOC accessibility.

Geographic Information System (GIS) has become an effective and reliable tool for researchers, policymakers, and decision-makers to map health

Many existing navigation systems facilitate pedestrian routing but lack the provision of personalised route alternatives tailored to individual needs. Previous research suggests that pedestrians often prioritise factors such as safety or accessibility over the shortest possible route. This paper investigates ways to enhance existing pedestrian navigation systems and improve walking experiences by providing personalised routes based on walking preferences. This is achieved by defining a set of routing preferences and implementing a modified version of Dijkstra’s algorithm. The goal of this work is to promote walking by enhancing mobility, accessibility, comfort, and safety.

The names of tourism types formed by scholars and practitioners reflect the connotations of various tourism types from different aspects and carry a wealth of tourism knowledge. The documents containing the names and connotations of 232 tourism types were sorted from the Springer Encyclopedia of Tourism and 16 major international academic journals. These documents were analyzed using the coding method of grounded theory. A total of 155 naming elements, 22 subcategories, and six categories were extracted. These naming elements, subcategories, and categories constitute the tourism-type ontology, which is the first tourism-type classification framework. Furthermore, the construction of tourism-type ontology enriches the existing research on overall tourism knowledge. The tourism-type ontology can also be used as a preliminary framework for organizing overall tourism knowledge and a foundation for constructing a unified tourism-type naming rule.

Background Dashboards are increasingly being used in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to support health policymaking and governance. However, their use has been mostly limited to routine care, not emergency services like emergency obstetric care (EmOC). To ensure a fit-for-purpose dashboard, we conducted an online survey with policymakers and researchers to understand key considerations needed for developing a policy-ready dashboard of geospatial access to EmOC in SSA. Methods Questionnaires targeting both stakeholder groups were pre-tested and disseminated in English, French, and Portuguese across SSA. We collected data on participants’ awareness of concern areas for geographic accessibility of EmOC and existing technological resources used for planning of EmOC services, the dynamic dashboard features preferences, and the dashboard's potential to tackle lack of geographic access to EmOC. Questions were asked as multiple-choice, Likert-scale, or open-ended. Descriptive statistics were used to summarise findings using frequencies or proportions. Free-text responses were recoded into themes where applicable. Results Among the 206 participants (88 policymakers and 118 researchers), 90% reported that rural areas and 23% that urban areas in their countries were affected by issues of geographic accessibility to EmOC. Five percent of policymakers and 38% of researchers were aware of the use of maps of EmOC facilities to guide planning of EmOC facility location. Regarding dashboard design, most visual components such as location of EmOC facilities had almost universal desirability; however, there were some exceptions. Nearly 70% of policymakers considered the socio-economic status of the population and households relevant to the dashboard. The desirability for a heatmap showing travel time to care was lower among policymakers (53%) than researchers (72%). Nearly 90% of participants considered three to four data updates per year or less frequent updates adequate for the dashboard. The potential usability of a dynamic dashboard was high amongst both policymakers (60%) and researchers (82%). Conclusion This study provides key considerations for developing a policy-ready dashboard for EmOC geographical accessibility in SSA. Efforts should now be targeted at establishing robust estimation of geographical accessibility metrics, integrated with existing health system data, and developing and maintaining the dashboard with up-to-date data to maximise impact in these settings.

A geocoded list of facilities from both public and non-public sectors capable of providing comprehensive emergency obstetric care (EmOC) for 15 selected urban conurbations in Nigeria ( Aba, Abuja, Benin City, Ibadan, Ilorin, Jos, Kaduna, Kano, Lagos, Maiduguri, Onitsha, Owerri, Port Harcourt, Uyo, and Warri ). We proxied and defined the availability of comprehensive EmOC services as any health facility that can offer caesarean section (CS) services

Maternal and perinatal mortality remain huge challenges globally, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where >98% of these deaths occur. Emergency obstetric care (EmOC) provided by skilled health personnel is an evidence-based package of interventions effective in reducing these deaths associated with pregnancy and childbirth. Until recently, pregnant women residing in urban areas have been considered to have good access to care, including EmOC. However, emerging evidence shows that due to rapid urbanization, this so called “urban advantage” is shrinking and in some LMIC settings, it is almost non-existent. This poses a complex challenge for structuring an effective health service delivery system, which tend to have poor spatial planning especially in LMIC settings. To optimize access to EmOC and ultimately reduce preventable maternal deaths within the context of urbanization, it is imperative to accurately locate areas and population groups that are geographically marginalized. Underpinning such assessments is accurately estimating travel time to health facilities that provide EmOC. In this perspective, we discuss strengths and weaknesses of approaches commonly used to estimate travel times to EmOC in LMICs, broadly grouped as reported and modeled approaches, while contextualizing our discussion in urban areas. We then introduce the novel OnTIME project, which seeks to address some of the key limitations in these commonly used approaches by leveraging big data. The perspective concludes with a discussion on anticipated outcomes and potential policy applications of the OnTIME project.

This chapter assesses underlying spatial relations for pedestrian wayfinding by examining navigational directions given in both forms of sketch maps and verbal descriptions. An experiment was conducted to investigate characteristics of navigational directions provided by participants in the form of sketch maps and verbal descriptions. The authors were specifically interested in the landmarks and spatial relationships such as route topology, linear order relation, and relative orientation extracted from the navigational directions. A new ontological approach to sketch and verbal interpretations was adopted for spatial analysis. The results pointed to the advantage of including sketch components into pedestrian navigation systems over solely turn-by-turn instructions. In addition, the results showed the differences between visual and verbal directions, which suggest the necessity of having different levels of directions for giving specific types of navigational instructions.

In this paper, we present a systematic approach to sketch map interpretation. The method decomposes the elements of a sketch map into a hierarchy of categories, from the material sketch map level to the non-material representational sketch map level, and then interprets the sketch map using the five formal representation spaces that we develop. These spaces set, graph, metric and Euclidean provide a tiered formal representation based on standard mathematical structures. We take the view that a sketch map bears information about the physical world and systematises this using extensions of existing formal ontologies. The motivation for this work is the partially automatic extraction and integration of information from sketch maps. We propose a set of ontologies and methods as a first step in the direction of a formalisation of partially automatic extraction and integration of sketch map content. We also see this work as a contribution to spatial cognition, where researchers externalise spatial knowledge using sketch mapping. The paper concludes by working through an example that demonstrates the sketch map interpretation at different levels using the underlying method.

GIScience 2016 Short Paper Proceedings Pedestrian Navigation Aids, Spatial Knowledge and Walkability Jia Wang, Michael Worboys Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Greenwich, 30 Park Row, London SE10 9LS, UK Email: {J.Wang, M.Worboys}@greenwich.ac.uk Abstract This study attempts to demonstrate the impact of pedestrian navigation aids on spatial knowledge acquisition and its link to walkability in an urban environment. Spatial knowledge is important for pedestrian travel. Rich spatial knowledge contributes to a good mental image of the walking environment, which consequently increases travel confidence and potentially allows more active walking. While there are plenty of studies on walkability, little work has been done on how navigation aids influence walkability. Using a pilot wayfinding experiment, we examined the effect on users’ acquired spatial knowledge of two major pedestrian navigation aids used in London in comparison to direct experience of routes. 1. Introduction and Background Walkability has become a widely discussed topic in urban and transportation planning and gained public interest since 2005. A walkable city that provides an accessible walking environment encourages more pedestrian walking. This results in benefits to the economy, improved public health and reduced ground emissions. Existing walkability studies focus on the assessment of street pattern, land use diversity and housing density (Frank et al. 2010), and relate to local routes and subjective pedestrian perceptions (Ewing and Handy 2006). Spatial knowledge is important for pedestrian travel. Better spatial knowledge contributes to richer cognitive maps and thus allows improved understanding of the walking space. Acquired spatial knowledge of an environment can be differentiated depending on whether it comes from direct resources associated with travel experiences or from indirect resources such as signs and maps. Researchers conducted several experiments to compare spatial knowledge obtained from different resources (Ishikawa et al. 2008). The design and placement of signage systems clearly affect pedestrian orientation during their journeys (Arthur and Passini 1992), and thus have impact on spatial knowledge. Recently various types of pedestrian navigation aids (PNA) have been developed as aids in wayfinding. These systems assist pedestrians in gaining the ability to get from one place to another, without getting lost (most of the time). Existing work focused mostly on GPS-based mobile devices (e.g., Huang et al. 2012). Little work has been done on how different PNAs, digital or non-digital, static or dynamic, influence spatial knowledge acquisition of pedestrians. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate the influences of different types of pedestrian navigation aids on spatial knowledge acquisition. A navigation aid was assessed by its support of spatial knowledge acquisition of its users. We conducted a pilot wayfinding experiment to assess the two major PNAs used in London (Google Maps & Legible London) in comparison to direct experience of routes as a base line. The Legible London system is a citywide signage system for pedestrian wayfinding initiated by Transport for London in 2007. It is designed to help visitors and local residents to easily gain local spatial knowledge and so

Encouraging pedestrian activity is increasingly recognised as beneficial for public health, the environment and the economy. As our cities become more crowded, there is a need for urban planners to take into account more explicitly pedestrian needs. The term that is now in use is that a city should be 'walkable'. For route planning, whereas much attention has been given to shortest path, in distance or time, much less attention has been paid to flow levels and the difficulties they pose on the route. This paper considers problems posed by conflicting paths, for example cross-traffic. We use network centrality measures to make a first estimate of differing levels of conflict posed at the network nodes. We take special note of the role of collective motion in determining network usage. A small case study illustrates the method.

It is commonly recognized that free-hand sketch maps are influenced by cognitive impacts and therefore sketch maps are incomplete, distorted, and schematized. This makes it difficult to achieve a one-to-one alignment between a sketch map and its corresponding geo-referenced metric map. Nevertheless, sketch maps are still useful to communicate spatial knowledge, indicating that sketch maps contain certain spatial information that is robust to cognitive impacts. In existing studies, sketch maps are used frequently to measure cognitive maps. However, little work has been done on invariant spatial information in sketch maps, which is the information of spatial configurations representing correctly the real world. We aim to study such information from a cognitive perspective. This paper first presents basic spatial objects identified in sketch maps and then introduces sketch aspects that capture invariant spatial information. The accuracy and reliability of these aspects were evaluated by a human study. We collected sketch maps from participants, extracted and measured spatial relations of identified spatial objects, and in the end analyzed the accuracy and statistical significance of these relations. Based on the statistical survey, we propose in this paper a set of seven sketch aspects that constitute invariant spatial information, along with a spatial analysis method to measure them. The findings of these aspects help to understand which spatial information is preserved under the transformation from the physical world to human sketch maps.

This article concerns the theoretical foundations of movement informatics. We discuss general frameworks in which models of spatial movement may be developed. In particular, the article considers the object–field and Lagrangian–Eulerian dichotomies, and the SNAP/SPAN ontologies of the dynamic world, and classifies the variety of informatic structures according to these frameworks. A major challenge is transitioning between paradigms. Usually data is captured with respect to one paradigm but can usefully be represented in another. We discuss this process in formal terms and then describe experiments that we performed to show feasibility. It emerges that observational granularity plays a crucial role in these transitions.

Over the past years, user-generated content has gained more prominence in the area of geographic information science. In many geo-spatial applications, sketch maps are considered as an intuitive user interaction modality. As typically only qualitative relations are persevered in sketch maps, processing spatial information on qualitative level has been suggested. The information represented in sketch maps are distorted, schematized, incomplete, and generalized. Particularly, streets are schematized and their angles of connectivity at junctions are distorted. In sketch maps, streets are lineal features and each street consists of one or more connected street segments. Straightening curved streets and distorting angles affect the qualitative information of streets. Thus, processing spatial information from sketch maps and making it available in information systems requires reliable formalizations which are robust against cognitive distortions. In this paper, we proposed a set of plausible representations to formalize the qualitative information of street segments in street networks. Further, we identify suitable orientation sectors. The orientation sectors are scrutinized and encoded with the proposed representation to capture the relative orientations of street segments. Afterwards, the representations are evaluated for the qualitative alignment of street segments from sketch maps with geo-referenced maps. The successful alignment of street segments will allow us to integrate spatial information from sketch maps into a Geographic Information System (GIS) as volunteered information

Sketch maps are externalizations of cognitive maps which are typically distorted, schematized, incomplete, and generalized. Processing spatial information from sketch maps automatically requires reliable formalizations which are not subject to schematization, distortion or other cognitive effects in sketch maps. Based on previous empirical work, we identified different sketch aspects such as ordering, topology and orientation to align and integrate information from sketch maps with metric maps qualitatively. This research addresses the question how these qualitative sketch aspects can be formalized for a computational approach for sketch map alignment. In this study, we focus on the ordering aspect: ordering of landmarks and street segments along routes and around junctions. We first investigate different qualitative representations and propose suitable representations to formalize these aspects. The proposed representations capture qualitative relations between spatial objects in the form of qualitative constraints networks. We then evaluate the proposed representations by testing the accuracy of qualitative constraints between sketched objects and their corresponding objects in a metric map. Results of the evaluation show that the proposed representations are suitable for the alignment of spatial objects from sketch maps with metric maps.

:More and more private citizens collect and publish environmental data via web-based geographic information systems. These systems face two challenges: The user interface must be intuitive and the processing of geographic information must account for cognitive impact. We propose to use sketch maps as the medium for interaction, because they reflect a person's spatial knowledge. Information from sketch maps is distorted, schematized, incomplete, and generalized and metric maps are not. This article employs qualitative representations for the alignment of sketch and metric maps. We suggest a set of cognitively oriented aspects in sketch maps stably computed by people and evaluate qualitative representations to formalize these aspects. This allows us to align and integrate geographic information from sketch maps.