Historical collaborative geocoding

The latest developments in digital have provided large data sets that can increasingly easily be accessed and used. These data sets often contain indirect localisation information, such as historical addresses. Historical geocoding is the process of transforming the indirect localisation information to direct localisation that can be placed on a map, which enables spatial analysis and cross-referencing. Many efficient geocoders exist for current addresses, but they do not deal with the temporal aspect and are based on a strict hierarchy (..., city, street, house number) that is hard or impossible to use with historical data. Indeed historical data are full of uncertainties (temporal aspect, semantic aspect, spatial precision, confidence in historical source, ...) that can not be resolved, as there is no way to go back in time to check. We propose an open source, open data, extensible solution for geocoding that is based on the building of gazetteers composed of geohistorical objects extracted from historical topographical maps. Once the gazetteers are available, geocoding an historical address is a matter of finding the geohistorical object in the gazetteers that is the best match to the historical address. The matching criteriae are customisable and include several dimensions (fuzzy semantic, fuzzy temporal, scale, spatial precision ...). As the goal is to facilitate historical work, we also propose web-based user interfaces that help geocode (one address or batch mode) and display over current or historical topographical maps, so that they can be checked and collaboratively edited. The system is tested on Paris city for the 19-20th centuries, shows high returns rate and is fast enough to be used interactively.Comment: WORKING PAPE

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

Efficient Spatial Keyword Search in Trajectory Databases

An increasing amount of trajectory data is being annotated with text descriptions to better capture the semantics associated with locations. The fusion of spatial locations and text descriptions in trajectories engenders a new type of top-$k$ queries that take into account both aspects. Each trajectory in consideration consists of a sequence of geo-spatial locations associated with text descriptions. Given a user location $\lambda$ and a keyword set $\psi$, a top-$k$ query returns $k$ trajectories whose text descriptions cover the keywords $\psi$ and that have the shortest match distance. To the best of our knowledge, previous research on querying trajectory databases has focused on trajectory data without any text description, and no existing work has studied such kind of top-$k$ queries on trajectories. This paper proposes one novel method for efficiently computing top-$k$ trajectories. The method is developed based on a new hybrid index, cell-keyword conscious B$^+$-tree, denoted by \cellbtree, which enables us to exploit both text relevance and location proximity to facilitate efficient and effective query processing. The results of our extensive empirical studies with an implementation of the proposed algorithms on BerkeleyDB demonstrate that our proposed methods are capable of achieving excellent performance and good scalability.Comment: 12 page

Multi-Source Spatial Entity Linkage

Besides the traditional cartographic data sources, spatial information can also be derived from location-based sources. However, even though different location-based sources refer to the same physical world, each one has only partial coverage of the spatial entities, describe them with different attributes, and sometimes provide contradicting information. Hence, we introduce the spatial entity linkage problem, which finds which pairs of spatial entities belong to the same physical spatial entity. Our proposed solution (QuadSky) starts with a time-efficient spatial blocking technique (QuadFlex), compares pairwise the spatial entities in the same block, ranks the pairs using Pareto optimality with the SkyRank algorithm, and finally, classifies the pairs with our novel SkyEx-* family of algorithms that yield 0.85 precision and 0.85 recall for a manually labeled dataset of 1,500 pairs and 0.87 precision and 0.6 recall for a semi-manually labeled dataset of 777,452 pairs. Moreover, we provide a theoretical guarantee and formalize the SkyEx-FES algorithm that explores only 27% of the skylines without any loss in F-measure. Furthermore, our fully unsupervised algorithm SkyEx-D approximates the optimal result with an F-measure loss of just 0.01. Finally, QuadSky provides the best trade-off between precision and recall, and the best F-measure compared to the existing baselines and clustering techniques, and approximates the results of supervised learning solutions

An IR-based Approach Towards Automated Integration of Geo-spatial Datasets in Map-based Software Systems

Data is arguably the most valuable asset of the modern world. In this era, the success of any data-intensive solution relies on the quality of data that drives it. Among vast amount of data that are captured, managed, and analyzed everyday, geospatial data are one of the most interesting class of data that hold geographical information of real-world phenomena and can be visualized as digital maps. Geo-spatial data is the source of many enterprise solutions that provide local information and insights. In order to increase the quality of such solutions, companies continuously aggregate geospatial datasets from various sources. However, lack of a global standard model for geospatial datasets makes the task of merging and integrating datasets difficult and error-prone. Traditionally, domain experts manually validate the data integration process by merging new data sources and/or new versions of previous data against conflicts and other requirement violations. However, this approach is not scalable and is hinder toward rapid release, when dealing with frequently changing big datasets. Thus more automated approaches with limited interaction with domain experts is required. As a first step to tackle this problem, in this paper, we leverage Information Retrieval (IR) and geospatial search techniques to propose a systematic and automated conflict identification approach. To evaluate our approach, we conduct a case study in which we measure the accuracy of our approach in several real-world scenarios and we interview with software developers at Localintel Inc. (our industry partner) to get their feedbacks.Comment: ESEC/FSE 2019 - Industry trac