22,985 research outputs found
Towards a Scalable Dynamic Spatial Database System
With the rise of GPS-enabled smartphones and other similar mobile devices,
massive amounts of location data are available. However, no scalable solutions
for soft real-time spatial queries on large sets of moving objects have yet
emerged. In this paper we explore and measure the limits of actual algorithms
and implementations regarding different application scenarios. And finally we
propose a novel distributed architecture to solve the scalability issues.Comment: (2012
Investigating the use of semantic technologies in spatial mapping applications
Semantic Web Technologies are ideally suited to build context-aware information retrieval applications. However, the geospatial aspect of context awareness presents unique challenges such as the semantic modelling of geographical references for efficient handling of spatial queries, the reconciliation of the heterogeneity at the semantic and geo-representation levels, maintaining the quality of service and scalability of communicating, and the efficient rendering of the spatial queries' results. In this paper, we describe the modelling decisions taken to solve these challenges by analysing our implementation of an intelligent planning and recommendation tool that provides location-aware advice for a specific application domain. This paper contributes to the methodology of integrating heterogeneous geo-referenced data into semantic knowledgebases, and also proposes mechanisms for efficient spatial interrogation of the semantic knowledgebase and optimising the rendering of the dynamically retrieved context-relevant information on a web frontend
Spatio-textual indexing for geographical search on the web
Many web documents refer to specific geographic localities and many
people include geographic context in queries to web search engines. Standard
web search engines treat the geographical terms in the same way as other terms.
This can result in failure to find relevant documents that refer to the place of
interest using alternative related names, such as those of included or nearby
places. This can be overcome by associating text indexing with spatial indexing
methods that exploit geo-tagging procedures to categorise documents with
respect to geographic space. We describe three methods for spatio-textual
indexing based on multiple spatially indexed text indexes, attaching spatial
indexes to the document occurrences of a text index, and merging text index
access results with results of access to a spatial index of documents. These
schemes are compared experimentally with a conventional text index search
engine, using a collection of geo-tagged web documents, and are shown to be
able to compete in speed and storage performance with pure text indexing
A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web
Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with
innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a
robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information
overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based
information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue
and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the
Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the
Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open
knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open
knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention
is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well
as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic
Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in
information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then
reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future
prospects
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