886 research outputs found
Location- and keyword-based querying of geo-textual data: a survey
With the broad adoption of mobile devices, notably smartphones, keyword-based search for content has seen increasing use by mobile users, who are often interested in content related to their geographical location. We have also witnessed a proliferation of geo-textual content that encompasses both textual and geographical information. Examples include geo-tagged microblog posts, yellow pages, and web pages related to entities with physical locations. Over the past decade, substantial research has been conducted on integrating location into keyword-based querying of geo-textual content in settings where the underlying data is assumed to be either relatively static or is assumed to stream into a system that maintains a set of continuous queries. This paper offers a survey of both the research problems studied and the solutions proposed in these two settings. As such, it aims to offer the reader a first understanding of key concepts and techniques, and it serves as an “index” for researchers who are interested in exploring the concepts and techniques underlying proposed solutions to the querying of geo-textual data.Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)Ministry of Education (MOE)Nanyang Technological UniversityThis research was supported in part by MOE Tier-2 Grant MOE2019-T2-2-181, MOE Tier-1 Grant RG114/19, an NTU ACE Grant, and the Singtel Cognitive and Artificial Intelligence Lab for Enterprises (SCALE@NTU), which is a collaboration between Singapore Telecommunications Limited (Singtel) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) that is funded by the Singapore Government through the Industry Alignment Fund Industry Collaboration Projects Grant, and by the Innovation Fund Denmark centre, DIREC
Estimating snow cover from publicly available images
In this paper we study the problem of estimating snow cover in mountainous
regions, that is, the spatial extent of the earth surface covered by snow. We
argue that publicly available visual content, in the form of user generated
photographs and image feeds from outdoor webcams, can both be leveraged as
additional measurement sources, complementing existing ground, satellite and
airborne sensor data. To this end, we describe two content acquisition and
processing pipelines that are tailored to such sources, addressing the specific
challenges posed by each of them, e.g., identifying the mountain peaks,
filtering out images taken in bad weather conditions, handling varying
illumination conditions. The final outcome is summarized in a snow cover index,
which indicates for a specific mountain and day of the year, the fraction of
visible area covered by snow, possibly at different elevations. We created a
manually labelled dataset to assess the accuracy of the image snow covered area
estimation, achieving 90.0% precision at 91.1% recall. In addition, we show
that seasonal trends related to air temperature are captured by the snow cover
index.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedi
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
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