Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The study of spatial dynamics incorporates time and generates an approach of great importance in scientific research, whose purpose is to determine the evolution of patterns of spatial distribution of land uses. The present work develops the conceptual and methodological aspects of spatial evolution analysis. Focused on the perspective of Rationalist Geography, we proceed to establish the scope of the concept and its link to the Geographic Information Systems as a tool oriented to the methodological application of cartographic superposition. In this sense, the methodology of detection of changes in land uses is presented, whose cartographic and statistical results allow to assess their magnitude, focused on determining the areas of profit and loss, net and total change, and exchanges between categories of uses of the land floor. The study area corresponds to three parties of the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires, where the urban growth of the urban agglomeration takes place, covering the period 2000-2010. The results obtained from the methodological application indicate the progress of urbanization on productive surfaces and the natural environment, mainly affecting agricultural and forestry activities. At the same time the process of agriculturization is appreciated that advances on spaces traditionally destined to the cattle and conservation activity. These results contribute to the realization of the diagnosis of the spatial dynamics of the occupation of the soil of the study area.

This article shows the analysis of pedestrian accessibility of the school-age population between 5 and 14 years old, towards the educational centers that offer the basic primary and basic secondary levels in the city of Ibagué. For the development of the study, information was provided on the city's road network, the population census for 2005 blocks and the educational centers of the urban area with their offer for 2017. The spatial and demographic understanding of the city together with the application of minimum time indicators, absolute accessibility and cumulative opportunities, they allow for an integral analysis taking into account the supply-demand for education. Based on the results obtained, a diagnosis is generated that evaluates the degree of accessibility that the school-age population has and the coverage that the educational centers have over the territory.

The central objective of this research was to develop a methodology for the quantification of global social vulnerability. The methodology is used to determine the risk of flooding in Motozintla. However, such methodology can be replicated in others communities in Mexico.  The methodology consisted in the following steps: (a) the cartographic actualization of the urban layout of Motozintla; (b) the establishment and characterization of a minimal sample of households for this study; (c) selection of variables for the identification of different types of vulnerabilities (structural, socio-economic, organizational, and perception of risk) and global vulnerability (all variables of the analyzed vulnerabilities considering a level of weighted incidence); (d) use of the interpolation method, Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW), to identify areas and levels of vulnerability and risk; and (e) use of a Geographic Information System for cartographic representation of the results and their spatial analysis.

The Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) are recognized, under the label of “Integrated Geospatial Information Systems and Services” as one of the goals defined in UN-GGIM  (2018) in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals 2030. Nevertheless, several voices are saying that the SDIs are not yet producing the expected results. To facilitate the resolution of their problems and gaps, it would be very useful to go deep in the existing SDI quality descriptions. This paper tries to go forward in this line of work taking as a basis the concept of interoperability as a core concept in SDIs. First of all, a brief and commented analysis is provided of the methodologies proposed until now for describing SDI quality. A descriptive taxonomy of quality indicators is proposed: actions performed indicators, quality results indicators, use indicators, impact indicators and cost-benefit indicators. A set of quality results indicators (resources implemented quality indicators) is presented following the European Interoperability Framework v2 stablished in 2017. Finally, a set of conclusions is outlined and some lines of work for improvement the situation are proposed, in most of cases with very necessary research areas associated.

This paper presents an analysis, focused on quality of geographic data and services, assuming that the usual approach to data quality need to be extended to web services following the basic Services Oriented Architecture for SDIs. The quality of the organization implementing the two kind of resources is also considered to have a more complete picture. The analysis is carried out with a critical judgment from the perspective of the demands that the numerous changes and tendencies demand on the three previous elements. Thus, the current situation regarding available standards and usual practices is analyzed and certain limitations of the usual standards and methods are judged from the perspective indicated above. The work offers lines of improvement to overcome this situation, many of which involve opening much-needed research fields.

Although reproducibility has been regarded as a pillar of the scientific process, in geoscience it has not been recognized as a concern yet. This is not because of the absence of the problem, but instead because of the absence of evidences. The international scientific community, including the geoscience, is promoting the generation of evidences and guidelines to overcome the “reproducibility crisis”. Thus, the aim of this document is to bring to the Latin American Geoscientists the issue of scientific reproducibility, as well as to open the discussion about how we can improve the reproducibility of our research.

Introduction: The Medical Residency of Family and Community Medicine and the Multiprofessional residence in Family Health contribute, in addition to learning, quality of care to the community, and the evaluation of this process maintains the quality of the service, the indicators being the instruments that allow planning in health. Objective: To evaluate the performance of the Medical Residency of Family and Community Medicine and Multiprofessional residence in Health of the Primary Care Family by monitoring the quality indicators of PMAQ-AB. Methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out with the analysis of the PMAQ-AB secondary data series (2011 to 2013) referring to the indicators of the first and second cycle of the teams with residents and/or graduates of the Primary Care residence. Descriptive analysis was performed, with absolute and relative frequency, and mean and standard deviation of the data. Results: 38.6% of the teams in the first cycle and 34.66% of the second cycle had their residency graduates. Average prenatal care of 8.75 (± 2.24), pregnant women with prenatal care on average, 91.43% (± 8.91). Children less than four months old exclusively breastfed, 82.51% (± 13.17) and 93.91% (± 6.59) of children under one year of age with up-to-date vaccine. People with diabetes 60.27% (± 16.28) and hypertension 61.31% (± 12.04). Medical consultations for continued/scheduled care averaging 26.00% (± 22.22). 100% user satisfaction with medium or above average performance. Conclusion: The study showed a predominance of positive evaluation of the teams evaluated in relation to indicators of women’s, child’s, general production and external evaluation, but it achieved a low performance in the indicator of chronic diseases.

Objective: To evaluate the Basic Care regarding the supplies, immunobiologicals and medicines available in the family health services of the municipality of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Methods: Cross-sectional, analytical research, conducted in 2014, from a ministerial instrument titled Self-Assessment for Improving Access and Quality of Primary Care, of family health teams. Eight items were considered, with values between zero and 10 points, of the total inadequacy to the total adequacy of the Basic Health Unit (UBS), to the evaluated item. The units were classified in quality standards “very unsatisfactory” to “very satisfactory” and analyzed according to rural and urban locations, level of significance p<0.05. Results: 75 teams participated, which presented significant inadequacy in the items: UBS dispose of all the vaccines required in the basic calendar, 5.95 (±4.003); to have supplies and medicines for the initial emergency/emergency approach, 2.33 (±2.500); presenting the basic medicines regularly, 3.68 (±3.146). The classification was regular for 45.3% of the units and unsatisfactory to 29.3%, without differences in urban or rural locations (p=0.479). Conclusion: There was an unsatisfactory evaluation, with inadequacies related to vaccines, the initial approach in emergency and emergency situations and the availability of medicines. Such a situation undermines the list of actions and the resolution of services, affecting the capacity of the team to effectively meet the population’s health demands.

A global trend in the first years of the 21st century has been the generation of platforms and open data by government entities for public consultation. These data allow citizens to generate new techniques and mechanisms for their analysis with the intention of achieving improvements in the political, social and economic system of a country. In this research, we propose a Data Science methodology focused on the geographical characterization of Mexican houses, using open data from the period 2014-2017 and applying unsupervised automated learning techniques. The application of this methodology allowed discovering, that there are seven types of houses in Mexico; all of them are distributed throughout the Mexican territory. The results are displayed on maps that will be very useful in applied science, for the study of human and geographical phenomena in different domains of knowledge, such as security, transport, health, economy, industry, agriculture, among others.

Nowadays, different institutions generate a large amount of geographical information, which require some new management and publication solutions to be proposed. In Ecuador, the heterogeneity of geographic information generated by different entities and published on the Web is not the exception. Aiming to solve this problem, the Geo Linked Data Ecuador project integrates geographic information from different sources and publishes it in RDF format, under the standards and recommendations of the Semantic Web community, as result, the Ecuadorian Geographic Linked Data Repository has been created.