186,111 research outputs found
Geospatial Narratives and their Spatio-Temporal Dynamics: Commonsense Reasoning for High-level Analyses in Geographic Information Systems
The modelling, analysis, and visualisation of dynamic geospatial phenomena
has been identified as a key developmental challenge for next-generation
Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In this context, the envisaged
paradigmatic extensions to contemporary foundational GIS technology raises
fundamental questions concerning the ontological, formal representational, and
(analytical) computational methods that would underlie their spatial
information theoretic underpinnings.
We present the conceptual overview and architecture for the development of
high-level semantic and qualitative analytical capabilities for dynamic
geospatial domains. Building on formal methods in the areas of commonsense
reasoning, qualitative reasoning, spatial and temporal representation and
reasoning, reasoning about actions and change, and computational models of
narrative, we identify concrete theoretical and practical challenges that
accrue in the context of formal reasoning about `space, events, actions, and
change'. With this as a basis, and within the backdrop of an illustrated
scenario involving the spatio-temporal dynamics of urban narratives, we address
specific problems and solutions techniques chiefly involving `qualitative
abstraction', `data integration and spatial consistency', and `practical
geospatial abduction'. From a broad topical viewpoint, we propose that
next-generation dynamic GIS technology demands a transdisciplinary scientific
perspective that brings together Geography, Artificial Intelligence, and
Cognitive Science.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; cognitive systems; human-computer
interaction; geographic information systems; spatio-temporal dynamics;
computational models of narrative; geospatial analysis; geospatial modelling;
ontology; qualitative spatial modelling and reasoning; spatial assistance
systemsComment: ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (ISSN 2220-9964);
Special Issue on: Geospatial Monitoring and Modelling of Environmental
Change}. IJGI. Editor: Duccio Rocchini. (pre-print of article in press
Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race and Embodied Labor
Recent methodological advances in Canadian Social Reproduction Feminism foreground labor as a foundational concept of social theory and, as a result, address the structuralist bias critics of the paradigm have identified, while still grounding theory in a comprehensive analysis that accounts for specifically capitalist relations. Yet, to fully address issues of racialization, this broad and dynamic concept of labor needs to be extended and complexified. Along with accounting for the sex-gender dimensions of labor, we need also to attend to its socio-spatial aspects. In other words, it’s not just what we do to reproduce society, but where we do it that counts in an imperial capitalist world. And Social Reproduction Feminism, with its expansive definition of labor and its comprehensive focus on the full spectrum of practical activity, is uniquely positioned to accommodate such complexity without forfeiting attentiveness to social relations of class and/or capitalism. It has the potential, therefore, to provide intersectional analyses with a methodology that brings “both capitalism and class back into the discussion.
What do we need to add to a social network to get a society? answer: something like what we have to add to a spatial network to get a city
Recent years have seen great advances in social network analysis. Yet, with a few exceptions, the
field of network analysis remains remote from social theory. As a result, much social network
research, while technically accomplished and theoretically suggestive, is essentially descriptive.
How then can social networks be linked to social theory ? Here we pose the question in its simplest
form: what must we add to a social network to get a society ? We begin by showing that one reason
for the disconnection between network theory and society theory is that because it exists in spacetime,
the concept of social network raises the issue of space in a way that is problematical for social
theory. Here we turn the problem on its head and make the problem of space in social network
theory explicit by proposing a surprising analogy with the question: what do you have to add to an
urban space network to get a city. We show first that by treating a city as a naïve spatial network in
the first instance and allowing it to acquire two formal properties we call reflexivity and nonlocality,
both mediated through a mechanism we call description retrieval, we can build a picture of the
dynamics processes by which collections of the buildings become living cities. We then show that
by describing societies initially as social networks in space-time and adding similar properties, we
can construct a plausible ontology of a simple human society
Broadcasting Convolutional Network for Visual Relational Reasoning
In this paper, we propose the Broadcasting Convolutional Network (BCN) that
extracts key object features from the global field of an entire input image and
recognizes their relationship with local features. BCN is a simple network
module that collects effective spatial features, embeds location information
and broadcasts them to the entire feature maps. We further introduce the
Multi-Relational Network (multiRN) that improves the existing Relation Network
(RN) by utilizing the BCN module. In pixel-based relation reasoning problems,
with the help of BCN, multiRN extends the concept of `pairwise relations' in
conventional RNs to `multiwise relations' by relating each object with multiple
objects at once. This yields in O(n) complexity for n objects, which is a vast
computational gain from RNs that take O(n^2). Through experiments, multiRN has
achieved a state-of-the-art performance on CLEVR dataset, which proves the
usability of BCN on relation reasoning problems.Comment: Accepted paper at ECCV 2018. 24 page
A visual representation of part-whole relationships in BFO-conformant ontologies
In the visual representation of ontologies, in particular of part-whole relationships, it is customary to use graph theory as the representational background. We claim here that the standard graph-based approach has a number of limitations, and we propose instead a new representation of part-whole structures for ontologies, and describe the results of experiments designed to show the effectiveness of this new proposal especially as concerns reduction of visual complexity. The proposal is developed to serve visualization of ontologies conformant to the Basic Formal Ontology. But it can be used also for more general applications, particularly in the biomedical domain
Case Adaptation with Qualitative Algebras
This paper proposes an approach for the adaptation of spatial or temporal
cases in a case-based reasoning system. Qualitative algebras are used as
spatial and temporal knowledge representation languages. The intuition behind
this adaptation approach is to apply a substitution and then repair potential
inconsistencies, thanks to belief revision on qualitative algebras. A temporal
example from the cooking domain is given. (The paper on which this extended
abstract is based was the recipient of the best paper award of the 2012
International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning.
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