Talk:Tobler's first law of geography

This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Geography Mid‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Geography, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of geography on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.GeographyWikipedia:WikiProject GeographyTemplate:WikiProject Geographygeography articles

Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

WikiProject Geography To-do list:

Here are some tasks awaiting attention:

Article requests : See Requested articles/Social sciences/Geography, cities, regions and named places and Missing articles about Locations
Assess : Tag related article talk pages with {{WikiProject Geography}}. To help assess the quality and importance of geography articles, please see: Unassessed geography articles and Unknown-importance geography articles.
Cleanup : See Geography articles needing attention
Deletion sorting : Listed at Geographic related deletion discussions
Geographical coordinates : See Articles missing geocoordinate data by country
Infobox : See Geography articles needing infoboxes
Map : See Wikipedia requested maps
Notability : See Geography articles with topics of unclear notability
Photo : See Wikipedia requested photographs of places
Stubs : See Geography stubs

probably Waldo R. Tobler has read geostatistics book this law come from geostatistic —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.89.2.194 (talk) 15:23, 2 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Do we really need a law for the statement, that "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things"? When I heard the first time about this, I thought "It must be hard to state something more obvious than this". I think Tobler's first law is a truism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.30.4.138 (talk) 15:20, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I guess this so-called "law" is too general and non-falsifiable to be useful. 79.139.206.248 (talk) 21:32, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Many but not all spatial (auto) correlation functions are decreasing. So strictly speaking, the law has empirical content (not a truism) and happens to be false. That said, it is a reasonable default expectation. If the functions decrease as expected, you ask:at what rate, and if not, you ask: what could be going on? It is a bit misleading to call it a law, it's more akin to a dictum, like blood is thicker than water. 92.184.121.70 (talk) 06:29, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'd love to see a source that says "Many but not all spatial (auto) correlation functions are decreasing. So strictly speaking, the law has empirical content (not a truism) and happens to be false." Especially in regard to physical geography, the first law of geography holds. Human geography is obviously messy, but closer points in space have more in common then distant in most instances I can think of. The First Law of Geography is essential for spatial analysis for several reasons, particularly by allowing us to exclude many variables, and ignore distant phenomena to our area of interest. Without it, spatial models are impossible.

The first law is broken into two parts, "everything is related to everything else," and "near things are more related than distant things." In the original paper, Tobler was looking at Detroit, and starts with just the first part of the law stating "As a premise, I make the assumption that everything is related to everything else. Superficially considered this would suggest a model of infinite complexity; a corollary inference often made is that social systems are difficult because they contain many variables; numerous people confuse the number of variables with the degree of complexity. Because of closure, however, models with infinite numbers of variables are in fact some- times more tractable than models with a finite but large number of variables." He goes on to state "Alternately, the world population potential could serve as a single surrogate for the 1.6 x 104 variables. Instead of using this approach I invoke the first law of geography: everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." Model creation is the process of simplifying reality. The assumption that near things are more related then distant things allows us to simplify our models and perform analysis without controlling for infinite variables. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 16:29, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Elaborating on the first law of geography

The first law of geography is one of the most fundamental concepts in geography today. It is perhaps the most significant outcome of the quantitative revolution. This article should be heavily elaborated on to reflect that. The law relates directly to the concept of distance decay and spatial autocorrelation. Fundamentally, it is the first assumption we must make when conducting spatial analysis. I suggest that a section detailing different studies that have referenced the first law might be a good place to start building the foundation and literature behind it. Elaboration on statistics that test it, such as Moran's I and Getis Ord Gi* would also be good. I'll be working on this as a project, but would appreciate help from anyone that wants to jump in. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 07:18, 20 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]