GGSD Program Details for DotProc

DotProc

Category	Plotting (special)
Publisher	SRK Consulting
Platform	Win95/98, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP
Status	Shareware
Description	DotProc carries out Fry analysis, Fractal analysis and Uniformity tests of point distributions. Fry analysis offers a visual approach to quantify characteristic spatial trends for groups of point objects. It can be used to search for anisotropies in the distribution of point objects. More specifically it can be used to investigate if a distribution of point objects occurs along linear trends, and whether such linear trends occur at a characteristic spacing. In Fry analysis data is assessed by placing a point object on a central point within a fixed reference frame. The position of all other occurrences relative to that point is marked. This procedure is then repeated for each point, and will result in a dot distribution pattern or Fry plot that displays the relative position of each point object to all other point objects viewed from a central position. If any regular patterns in terms of spacing and orientation of point objects exists, the Fry plot will enhance such patterns allowing visual assessment of the controlling trends. Orientation diagrams investigate the orientation distribution of the connecting lines between points in the Fry plot. When considering a Fry plot, lines can be drawn between all points in the plot. Each such line has a specific length and orientation. If the original data set is a perfectly random point distribution, lines of all lengths will be homogeneously distributed in all directions. If the original distribution is not random, lines of particular lengths and/or orientations will occur more frequently, displaying a fabric. Therefore this technique allows quantification of the direction of preferred orientations of point distributions that can be seen in the Fry plot. The distribution of the length of connecting lines between points in a Fry plot can be further analyzed by looking at the frequency distribution of lines that fall within a particular length range. This allows an assessment of clustering effects and enables you to semi-quantitatively determine the characteristic spacing of linear arrays observed on the Fry plot. A point distribution is said to be fractal if it exhibits scale invariance. In other words, the distribution pattern looks the same at a range of different magnifications. To test the fractal nature of a point distribution, square grids of various cell sizes are superimposed on the points. For each grid cell size (as characterized by the side length of a grid square), the number of grid squares required to cover all points is counted.
Cost	US Dollars 40
Data formats supported	None stated
Supplier in Russian Federation	SRK Consulting