Automatic Identification of Addresses: A Systematic Literature Review

Cruz, P., Vanneschi, L., Painho, M., & Rita, P. (2022). Automatic Identification of Addresses: A Systematic Literature Review. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 11(1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi11010011 -----------------------------------------------------------------------The work by Leonardo Vanneschi, Marco Painho and Paulo Rita was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) within the Project: UIDB/04152/2020—Centro de Investigação em Gestão de Informação (MagIC). The work by Prof. Leonardo Vanneschi was also partially supported by FCT, Portugal, through funding of project AICE (DSAIPA/DS/0113/2019).Address matching continues to play a central role at various levels, through geocoding and data integration from different sources, with a view to promote activities such as urban planning, location-based services, and the construction of databases like those used in census operations. However, the task of address matching continues to face several challenges, such as non-standard or incomplete address records or addresses written in more complex languages. In order to better understand how current limitations can be overcome, this paper conducted a systematic literature review focused on automated approaches to address matching and their evolution across time. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were followed, resulting in a final set of 41 papers published between 2002 and 2021, the great majority of which are after 2017, with Chinese authors leading the way. The main findings revealed a consistent move from more traditional approaches to deep learning methods based on semantics, encoder-decoder architectures, and attention mechanisms, as well as the very recent adoption of hybrid approaches making an increased use of spatial constraints and entities. The adoption of evolutionary-based approaches and privacy preserving methods stand as some of the research gaps to address in future studies.publishersversionpublishe

Randomised trial investigating the relationship of response rate for blood sample donation to site of biospecimen collection, fasting status and reminder letter: The 45 and Up Study

BACKGROUND Various options exist for collecting biospecimens and biomarkers from cohort study participants, and these have important logistic, resource and scientific implications. Evidence on how different collection methods affect participation and data quality is lacking. This parallel-design randomised trial, the Link-Up Study, involved blood sample donation and other data collection among participants in an existing cohort study, The 45 and Up Study. It aimed to investigate the relation of fasting status, reminder letters and data collection site to response rates, data quality and biospecimen yield. METHODS Individuals aged 45 and over participating in The 45 and Up Study and living ≤ 20 km from central Wagga Wagga, NSW (regional area) or ≤ 10 km from central Parramatta, NSW (urban area) (n=2340) were randomised, stratified by area of residence, to be invited to give a blood sample and additional data by attending either a clinic established specifically for the trial, with an appointment time ("dedicated clinic", n=1336) or an existing local commercial pathology centre (n=1004). Within dedicated clinic groups, participants were randomised into fasting (n=668) or non-fasting (n=668) and, at the Parramatta pathology centre site, reminder letter after two weeks (n=336) or no reminder (n=334). RESULTS Overall, 33% (762/2340) of invitees took part in the Link-Up Study; 41% (410/1002) among regional and 26% (352/1338) among urban-area residents (p<0.0001). At the dedicated clinics, response rates were 38% (257/668) not fasting and 38% fasting (257/668) (participation rate ratio (RR) =1.00, 95%CI 0.91-1.08, p=0.98). The response rate was 22% among individuals randomised to attend the Parramatta pathology centre without a reminder and 23% among those sent a reminder letter (RR=1.01, 0.93-1.09, p=0.74). In total, the response rate was 38% (514/1336) at the dedicated clinics and 25% (248/1004) at the pathology centres (RR=0.67, 0.56-0.78, p<0.01); measures of height, weight and systolic and diastolic blood pressure did not vary materially between these groups, nor did the median number of aliquots of plasma, buffy coat and red cells collected. CONCLUSIONS Among cohort study participants, response rates for an additional study involving biospecimen collection, but not data quality or average biospecimen yield, were considerably higher at dedicated clinics than at existing commercial pathology sites.This specific project was funded by The Cancer Council NSW. Emily Banks is supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council

Building Blocks for Mapping Services

Mapping services are ubiquitous on the Internet. These services enjoy a considerable user base. But it is often overlooked that providing a service on a global scale with virtually millions of users has been the playground of an oligopoly of a select few service providers are able to do so. Unfortunately, the literature on these solutions is more than scarce. This thesis adds a number of building blocks to the literature that explain how to design and implement a number of features

Coastal management and adaptation: an integrated data-driven approach

Coastal regions are some of the most exposed to environmental hazards, yet the coast is the preferred settlement site for a high percentage of the global population, and most major global cities are located on or near the coast. This research adopts a predominantly anthropocentric approach to the analysis of coastal risk and resilience. This centres on the pervasive hazards of coastal flooding and erosion. Coastal management decision-making practices are shown to be reliant on access to current and accurate information. However, constraints have been imposed on information flows between scientists, policy makers and practitioners, due to a lack of awareness and utilisation of available data sources. This research seeks to tackle this issue in evaluating how innovations in the use of data and analytics can be applied to further the application of science within decision-making processes related to coastal risk adaptation. In achieving this aim a range of research methodologies have been employed and the progression of topics covered mark a shift from themes of risk to resilience. The work focuses on a case study region of East Anglia, UK, benefiting from the input of a partner organisation, responsible for the region’s coasts: Coastal Partnership East. An initial review revealed how data can be utilised effectively within coastal decision-making practices, highlighting scope for application of advanced Big Data techniques to the analysis of coastal datasets. The process of risk evaluation has been examined in detail, and the range of possibilities afforded by open source coastal datasets were revealed. Subsequently, open source coastal terrain and bathymetric, point cloud datasets were identified for 14 sites within the case study area. These were then utilised within a practical application of a geomorphological change detection (GCD) method. This revealed how analysis of high spatial and temporal resolution point cloud data can accurately reveal and quantify physical coastal impacts. Additionally, the research reveals how data innovations can facilitate adaptation through insurance; more specifically how the use of empirical evidence in pricing of coastal flood insurance can result in both communication and distribution of risk. The various strands of knowledge generated throughout this study reveal how an extensive range of data types, sources, and advanced forms of analysis, can together allow coastal resilience assessments to be founded on empirical evidence. This research serves to demonstrate how the application of advanced data-driven analytical processes can reduce levels of uncertainty and subjectivity inherent within current coastal environmental management practices. Adoption of methods presented within this research could further the possibilities for sustainable and resilient management of the incredibly valuable environmental resource which is the coast

Spatial access to healthcare: exploring the provision of local services

This thesis creates a context for exploring the provision of local healthcare services quantitatively, with particular focus on the application of spatial analysis and the use of geographic information systems (GIS). It focuses theoretically on the intersections between: health and medical geography; GIScience and spatially integrated social science; and social justice and spatial equity, elucidating the value of space and place in understanding patient registration with, and usage of, healthcare services. The practical elements of the thesis are based on patient registration data provided by Southwark primary care trust (PCT), and Hospital Episode Statistics from the NHS Information Centre. Focussing initially on primary care, registration with GP surgeries in Southwark is considered firstly from a normative perspective, and subsequently by employing a service area delineation approach. Profiling GP surgeries in this way enables an insight into patient registration behaviours, and sheds light on the challenges of implementing an agenda of patient choice as advocated by recent NHS white papers. The perspective of inpatient and outpatient care is also considered, given the increasing import of joined up provision in primary and secondary care. The thesis considers the linkage between the two service hierarchies, investigating utilisation of secondary care by patients. The value of this thesis derives from its relevance to the reform agenda that looks likely to radically reshape the NHS, the exploitation of patient registration data at individual level, novel use of classification, and the systematic application of spatial analysis across a range of scales

Change in alcohol outlet density and alcohol-related harm to population health (CHALICE): a comprehensive record-linked database study in Wales

Excess alcohol consumption has many adverse effects on health, including an increased risk of liver cirrhosis, gastrointestinal tract and breast cancers, high blood pressure and stroke. There is also an increased risk of harm resulting from antisocial behaviour and violence. Binge drinking is a particular problem, with the highest prevalence in the 16- to 24-year age group for women and men. Up to 40% of attendances at accident and emergency (A&E) departments and around half of all violent crimes in the UK are alcohol related. Around 37% of men and 25% of women exceeded UK guidelines for safe levels of alcohol consumption in 2014 (women more than three units per day; men more than four units per day) and 19% of men and 11% of women binge drink (women more than six units per day; men more than eight units per day). Given the wide range of harm resulting from this substantial level of excess consumption, the potential impact on health at the population level from a reduction in consumption is considerable. One of the principal policies recommended by the British Medical Association to reduce alcohol consumption is to reduce easy access to alcohol through controls on hours of sale and outlet density. This uses the availability theory of alcohol-related harm, which states that harmful outcomes are linked directly or indirectly to a greater availability of alcohol, through a higher density of alcohol outlets, leading to higher consumption and hence alcohol-related harm. However, the evidence relating outlet density to alcohol-related harm is not consistent. Many cross-sectional studies have suggested that high outlet densities are associated with a higher rate of a wide range of alcohol-related injuries. Fewer studies have investigated associations between outlet density and non-injury health outcomes, suggesting that high outlet densities are associated with high levels of consumption, sexually transmitted infections and alcohol-related hospital admissions. There have been few longitudinal studies but these have provided limited evidence that an increase in outlet density is associated with increased consumption and interpersonal violence and that a decrease in proximity to outlets is associated with a small decrease in consumption. No longitudinal studies of admissions to hospital have been published for non-violent outcomes. Many methodological questions remain over the best way to measure outlet density and how to model the relationship with alcohol-related harms. Little is known about the effects of a change in outlet density on inequalities in alcohol-related health and the role of population migration

Data integration for urban transport planning

Urban transport planning aims at balancing conflicting challenges by promoting more efficient transport systems while reducing negative impacts. The availability of better and more reliable data has not only stimulated new planning methodologies, but also created challenges for efficient data management and data integration. The major focus of this study is to improve methodologies for representing and integrating multi-source and multi-format urban transport data. This research approaches the issue of data integration based on the classification of urban transport data both from a functional and a representational perspective. The functional perspective considers characteristics of the urban transport system and planning requirements, and categorises data into supply, demand, performance and impact. The representational perspective considers transport data in terms of their spatial and non-spatial characteristics that are important for data representation. These two perspectives correspond to institutional and methodological data integration respectively, and are the foundation of transport data integration. This research is based on the city of Wuhan in China. The methodological issues of transport data integration are based on the representational perspective. A framework for data integration has been put forward, in which spatial data are classified as point, linear and areal types, and the non-spatial data are sorted out as values and temporal attributes. This research has respectively probed the integration of point, linear and areal transport data within a GIS environment. The locations of socio-economic activities are point-type data that need to be spatially referenced. A location referencing process requires a referencing base, source address units and referencing methods. The referencing base consists of such spatial features as streets, street addresses, points of interest and publicly known zones. These referencing bases have different levels of spatial preciseness and have to be kept in a hierarchy. Source addresses in Chinese cities are usually written as one sentence, which has to be divided into address units for automatic geo-coding. As it is difficult to separate from the sentences, the address units have to be clearly identified in survey forms. Depending on the types of address units, the referencing process makes use of either semantic name matching or address matching to link source addresses to features in the referencing base. The name-based and road-based referencing schemes constitute a comprehensive location referencing framework that is applicable to Chinese cities. The relationship between two sets of linear features can be identified with spatial overlay in the case of independent representation, or with internal linkage in a dependent representation. The bus line is such a feature that runs on the street network and can be dependently referenced by streets. In the heavily bus-oriented city of Wuhan, bus lines constitute a large public transit network that is important to transport planning and management. This research has extended conventional bus line representation to a more detailed level. Each bus line has been differentiated as two directional routes that are defined separately with reference to the street network. Accordingly, individual route stops are also represented in the database. These stop sites are spatial features with geometry that are linked to street segments and bus routes by linear location referencing methods. A data model linking base street network, bus lines and routes, line and route stops, and other bus operations data has been constructed. The benefits of the detailed model have been demonstrated in several transport applications. Zonal data transitions include three types of operations, i.e. aggregation, areal interpolation and disaggregation. This study focuses on disaggregating data from larger zones to smaller zones. In the context of Wuhan, zonal data disaggregation involves the allocation of statistical data from statistical units to smaller parcels. Given the availability of land use data, a weighted approach reflecting spatial variations has been applied in the disaggregation process. Two technical processes for disaggregation have been examined. Weighted area-weighting (WAW) is an adaptation of the classic area-weighting method, and Monte Carlo simulation (MC) is a stochastic process based on a raster data model. The MC outcome is more convenient for subsequent re-aggregation, and is also directly available for micro-simulation. An important contribution arising from this zonal integration study is that two standardised disaggregation tools have been developed within a GIS environment. The research has also explored the institutional aspect of data integration. The findings of this study show that there is generally a good institutional transport structure in the city of Wuhan and that there is also a growing awareness of using information technology. Professional cooperation exists among transport organisations, but not yet at a level for data sharing. An integrated data support framework requires data sharing. In such a framework, it should be possible to know where to get data for specific transport studies, or which kind of research an institution supports

Proceedings of the GIS Research UK 18th Annual Conference GISRUK 2010

This volume holds the papers from the 18th annual GIS Research UK (GISRUK). This year the conference, hosted at University College London (UCL), from Wednesday 14 to Friday 16 April 2010. The conference covered the areas of core geographic information science research as well as applications domains such as crime and health and technological developments in LBS and the geoweb. UCL’s research mission as a global university is based around a series of Grand Challenges that affect us all, and these were accommodated in GISRUK 2010. The overarching theme this year was “Global Challenges”, with specific focus on the following themes: * Crime and Place * Environmental Change * Intelligent Transport * Public Health and Epidemiology * Simulation and Modelling * London as a global city * The geoweb and neo-geography * Open GIS and Volunteered Geographic Information * Human-Computer Interaction and GIS Traditionally, GISRUK has provided a platform for early career researchers as well as those with a significant track record of achievement in the area. As such, the conference provides a welcome blend of innovative thinking and mature reflection. GISRUK is the premier academic GIS conference in the UK and we are keen to maintain its outstanding record of achievement in developing GIS in the UK and beyond

Revisiting the capitalization of public transport accessibility into residential land value: an empirical analysis drawing on Open Science

Background: The delivery and effective operation of public transport is fundamental for a for a transition to low-carbon emission transport systems’. However, many cities face budgetary challenges in providing and operating this type of infrastructure. Land value capture (LVC) instruments, aimed at recovering all or part of the land value uplifts triggered by actions other than the landowner, can alleviate some of this pressure. A key element of LVC lies in the increment in land value associated with a particular public action. Urban economic theory supports this idea and considers accessibility to be a core element for determining residential land value. Although the empirical literature assessing the relationship between land value increments and public transport infrastructure is vast, it often assumes homogeneous benefits and, therefore, overlooks relevant elements of accessibility. Advancements in the accessibility concept in the context of Open Science can ease the relaxation of such assumptions. Methods: This thesis draws on the case of Greater Mexico City between 2009 and 2019. It focuses on the effects of the main public transport network (MPTN) which is organised in seven temporal stages according to its expansion phases. The analysis incorporates location based accessibility measures to employment opportunities in order to assess the benefits of public transport infrastructure. It does so by making extensive use of the open-source software OpenTripPlanner for public transport route modelling (≈ 2.1 billion origin-destination routes). Potential capitalizations are assessed according to the hedonic framework. The property value data includes individual administrative mortgage records collected by the Federal Mortgage Society (≈ 800,000). The hedonic function is estimated using a variety of approaches, i.e. linear models, nonlinear models, multilevel models, and spatial multilevel models. These are estimated by the maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods. The study also examines possible spatial aggregation bias using alternative spatial aggregation schemes according to the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) literature. Results: The accessibility models across the various temporal stages evidence the spatial heterogeneity shaped by the MPTN in combination with land use and the individual perception of residents. This highlights the need to transition from measures that focus on the characteristics of transport infrastructure to comprehensive accessibility measures which reflect such heterogeneity. The estimated hedonic function suggests a robust, positive, and significant relationship between MPTN accessibility and residential land value in all the modelling frameworks in the presence of a variety of controls. The residential land value increases between 3.6% and 5.7% for one additional standard deviation in MPTN accessibility to employment in the final set of models. The total willingness to pay (TWTP) is considerable, ranging from 0.7 to 1.5 times the equivalent of the capital costs of the bus rapid transit Line-7 of the Metrobús system. A sensitivity analysis shows that the hedonic model estimation is sensitive to the MAUP. In addition, the use of a post code zoning scheme produces the closest results compared to the smallest spatial analytical scheme (0.5 km hexagonal grid). Conclusion: The present thesis advances the discussion on the capitalization of public transport on residential land value by adopting recent contributions from the Open Science framework. Empirically, it fills a knowledge gap given the lack of literature around this topic in this area of study. In terms of policy, the findings support LVC as a mechanism of considerable potential. Regarding fee-based LVC instruments, there are fairness issues in relation to the distribution of charges or exactions to households that could be addressed using location based measures. Furthermore, the approach developed for this analysis serves as valuable guidance for identifying sites with large potential for the implementation of development based instruments, for instance land readjustments or the sale/lease of additional development rights