13,613 research outputs found
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
Extraction de termes, reconnaissance et labellisation de relations dans un th\'esaurus
Within the documentary system domain, the integration of thesauri for
indexing and retrieval information steps is usual. In libraries, documents own
rich descriptive information made by librarians, under descriptive notice based
on Rameau thesaurus. We exploit two kinds of information in order to create a
first semantic structure. A step of conceptualization allows us to define the
various modules used to automatically build the semantic structure of the
indexation work. Our current work focuses on an approach that aims to define an
ontology based on a thesaurus. We hope to integrate new knowledge
characterizing the territory of our structure (adding "toponyms" and links
between concepts) thanks to a geographic information system (GIS)
Technology Integration around the Geographic Information: A State of the Art
One of the elements that have popularized and facilitated the use of geographical information on a variety of computational applications has been the use of Web maps; this has opened new research challenges on different subjects, from locating places and people, the study of social behavior or the analyzing of the hidden structures of the terms used in a natural language query used for locating a place. However, the use of geographic information under technological features is not new, instead it has been part of a development and technological integration process. This paper presents a state of the art review about the application of geographic information under different approaches: its use on location based services, the collaborative user participation on it, its contextual-awareness, its use in the Semantic Web and the challenges of its use in natural languge queries. Finally, a prototype that integrates most of these areas is presented
Geographical information retrieval with ontologies of place
Geographical context is required of many information retrieval tasks in which the target of the search may be documents, images or records which are referenced to geographical space only by means of place names. Often there may be an imprecise match between the query name and the names associated with candidate sources of information. There is a need therefore for geographical information retrieval facilities that can rank the relevance of candidate information with respect to geographical closeness of place as well as semantic closeness with respect to the information of interest. Here we present an ontology of place that combines limited coordinate data with semantic and qualitative spatial relationships between places. This parsimonious model of geographical place supports maintenance of knowledge of place names that relate to extensive regions of the Earth at multiple levels of granularity. The ontology has been implemented with a semantic modelling system linking non-spatial conceptual hierarchies with the place ontology. An hierarchical spatial distance measure is combined with Euclidean distance between place centroids to create a hybrid spatial distance measure. This is integrated with thematic distance, based on classification semantics, to create an integrated semantic closeness measure that can be used for a relevance ranking of retrieved objects
The DIGMAP geo-temporal web gazetteer service
This paper presents the DIGMAP geo-temporal Web gazetteer service, a system providing access to names of places, historical periods, and associated geo-temporal information. Within the DIGMAP project, this gazetteer serves as the unified repository of geographic and temporal information, assisting in the recognition and disambiguation of geo-temporal expressions over text, as well as in resource searching and indexing. We describe the data integration methodology, the handling of temporal information and some of the applications that use the gazetteer. Initial evaluation results show that the proposed system can adequately support several tasks related to geo-temporal information extraction and retrieval
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
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
Neogeography: The Challenge of Channelling Large and Ill-Behaved Data Streams
Neogeography is the combination of user generated data and experiences with mapping technologies. In this article we present a research project to extract valuable structured information with a geographic component from unstructured user generated text in wikis, forums, or SMSes. The extracted information should be integrated together to form a collective knowledge about certain domain. This structured information can be used further to help users from the same domain who want to get information using simple question answering system. The project intends to help workers communities in developing countries to share their knowledge, providing a simple and cheap way to contribute and get benefit using the available communication technology
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