HARA, Shoichiro


Director/Professor

Area of specialty:

Informatics

Research overview:

I am engaged in research of establishing a new paradigm called Area Informatics and developing information platforms to support the new paradigm. My objective is to comprehensively study information on different themes (perspectives) for a given region, to compare the same theme in different regions, and to develop information models to integrate and analyze variety of data. When dealing with the diverse information in area studies, time and place must be essential attributes.
This is why I became interested in and started spatiotemporal research and development of tools. Accumulating, rearranging and visualizing various data in the context of time and space can reveal new relationships that are unseen if each data is not organized. From 2003, I have developed spatiotemporal tools, including digital gazetteers. As applications of theses tools, I have been extracting and quantifying spatiotemporal attributes from historical records and analyzing data statistical ways. In the future, I would like to expand these methods to public health and regional nursing activities with spatiotemporal and statistical methods to conduct research on various topics including international comparison related to health.

http://www.cias.kyoto-u.ac.jp/staff/hara.php