Customer Reviews

Mobility, Data Mining and Privacy: Geographic Knowledge Discovery

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As the review title suggests, the first drawback with this book is a lack of index. It is inconceivable that a book of this sophistication could be published without an index.

Putting that immense weakness aside, this is a really useful book. I am always wary of books that are really just collections of papers with each chapter written by a different set of authors. I have written such chapters for composite books myself and realise how little co-ordination there normally is between the authors and, consequently, between the chapters. So chapter N will use different terminology from chapter M for the same concept, chapter N+1 will not follow-on from chapter N, etc. Certainly this book has some of that weakness but there does seem to have been some sort of effort to align terminology and reduce repetition between papers.

There are a lot of grammatical errors not picked up in the editing phase (speeds measured in km on page 277, "hypothesis" for "hypotheses" on page 50, etc.) but apart from rather nasty misprint on page 59 they don't generally cause a loss of sense in the article.

OK, once beyond the lack of index (!!!) and grammatical errors, what are the articles like? Generally insightful, stimulating and useful. They are almost without exception fairly elementary and do not demand any great depth of knowledge in location technologies or data analysis. Instead the content is qualitative and presents methods for approaching issues rather than solutions of those issues.

I'm glad I bought the book and have learned from it.

My background: practitioner rather than academic in this field. Designing and writing systems for location-based knowledge discovery.