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Empirical Study On Location Indeterminacy Of Localities, Sungsoon Hwang, Jean-Claude Thill

Sungsoon Hwang

It is often the case that locality boundaries are not sharply delineated in our mental maps. This paper examines the level of uncertainty involved in perceiving qualitative boundaries of urban vs. rural localities. To measure location indeterminacy of locality, we begin with modeling locality as fuzzy region or also known as egg-yolk model which is composed of core, boundary, and exterior. The more a specific locality (e.g., Buffalo, Amherst) is geocoded within core, the more locality is location-determinant. 5460 fatal traffic accidents gathered from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) in New York State from year 1996 to 2001 are …