Techniques for Computing Fitness of Use (FoU) for Time Series Datasets with Applications in the Geospatial Domain

Time series data are widely used in many applications including critical decision support systems. The goodness of the dataset, called the Fitness of Use (FoU), used in the analysis has direct bearing on the quality of the information and knowledge generated and hence on the quality of the decisions based on them. Unlike traditional quality of data which is independent of the application in which it is used, FoU is a function of the application. As the use of geospatial time series datasets increase in many critical applications, it is important to develop formal methodologies to compute their FoU and propagate it to the derived information, knowledge and decisions. In this paper we propose a formal framework to compute the FoU of time series datasets. We present three different techniques using the Dempster-Shafer belief theory framework as the foundation. These three approaches investigate the FoU by focusing on three aspects of data: data attributes, data stability, and impact of gap periods, respectively. The effectiveness of each approach is shown using an application in hydrological datasets that measure streamflow. While we use hydrological information analysis as our application domain in this research, the techniques can be used in many other domains as well

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 2 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division 9 Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 12 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 14 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 16 Advertisements IEEE

Big Data Guided Resources Businesses – Leveraging Location Analytics and Managing Geospatial-temporal Knowledge

Location data rapidly grow with fast-changing logistics and business rules. Due to fast-growing business ventures and their diverse operations locally and globally, location-based information systems are in demand in resource industries. Data sources in these industries are spatial-temporal, with petabytes in size. Managing volumes and various data in periodic and geographic dimensions using the existing modelling methods is challenging. The current relational database models have implementation challenges, including the interpretation of data views. Multidimensional models are articulated to integrate resource databases with spatial-temporal attribute dimensions. Location and periodic attribute dimensions are incorporated into various schemas to minimise ambiguity during database operations, ensuring resource data's uniqueness and monotonic characteristics. We develop an integrated framework compatible with the multidimensional repository and implement its metadata in resource industries. The resources’ metadata with spatial-temporal attributes enables business research analysts a scope for data views’ interpretation in new geospatial knowledge domains for financial decision support

Integrating Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems

Remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) comprise the two major components of geographic information science (GISci), an overarching field of endeavor that also encompasses global positioning systems (GPS) technology, geodesy and traditional cartography (Goodchild 1992, Estes and Star 1993, Hepner et al. 2005). Although remote sensing and GIS developed quasi-independently, the synergism between them has become increasingly apparent (Aronoff 2005). Today, GIS software almost always includes tools for display and analysis of images, and image processing software commonly contains options for analyzing ‘ancillary’ geospatial data (Faust 1998). The significant progress made in ‘integration’ of remote sensing and GIS has been well-summarized in several reviews (Ehlers 1990, Mace 1991, Hinton 1996, Wilkinson 1996). Nevertheless, advances are so rapid that periodic reassessment of the state-of-the-art is clearly warranted

A Service Oriented Framework for Analysing Social Network Activities

AbstractAnalysing and monitoring Social Networking activities raise multiple challenges for the evolution of Service Oriented Systems Engineering. This is particularly evident for event detection in social networks and, more in general, for large-scale Social Analytics, which require continuous processing of data. In this paper we present a service oriented framework exploring effective ways to leverage the opportunities coming from innovations and evolutions in computational power, storage, and infrastructures, with particular focus on modern architectures including in-memory database technology, in-database computation, massive parallel processing, Open Data Services, and scalability with multi-node clusters in Cloud. A prototype of this system was experimented in the contest of a specific kind of social event, an art exhibition of sculptures, where the system collected and analyzed in real-time the tweets issued in an entire region, including exhibition sites, and continuously updated analytical dashboards placed in one of the exhibition rooms

Fundamental structures of dynamic social networks

Social systems are in a constant state of flux with dynamics spanning from minute-by-minute changes to patterns present on the timescale of years. Accurate models of social dynamics are important for understanding spreading of influence or diseases, formation of friendships, and the productivity of teams. While there has been much progress on understanding complex networks over the past decade, little is known about the regularities governing the micro-dynamics of social networks. Here we explore the dynamic social network of a densely-connected population of approximately 1000 individuals and their interactions in the network of real-world person-to-person proximity measured via Bluetooth, as well as their telecommunication networks, online social media contacts, geo-location, and demographic data. These high-resolution data allow us to observe social groups directly, rendering community detection unnecessary. Starting from 5-minute time slices we uncover dynamic social structures expressed on multiple timescales. On the hourly timescale, we find that gatherings are fluid, with members coming and going, but organized via a stable core of individuals. Each core represents a social context. Cores exhibit a pattern of recurring meetings across weeks and months, each with varying degrees of regularity. Taken together, these findings provide a powerful simplification of the social network, where cores represent fundamental structures expressed with strong temporal and spatial regularity. Using this framework, we explore the complex interplay between social and geospatial behavior, documenting how the formation of cores are preceded by coordination behavior in the communication networks, and demonstrating that social behavior can be predicted with high precision.Comment: Main Manuscript: 16 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary Information: 39 pages, 34 figure

Knowledge discovery from trajectories

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesAs a newly proliferating study area, knowledge discovery from trajectories has attracted more and more researchers from different background. However, there is, until now, no theoretical framework for researchers gaining a systematic view of the researches going on. The complexity of spatial and temporal information along with their combination is producing numerous spatio-temporal patterns. In addition, it is very probable that a pattern may have different definition and mining methodology for researchers from different background, such as Geographic Information Science, Data Mining, Database, and Computational Geometry. How to systematically define these patterns, so that the whole community can make better use of previous research? This paper is trying to tackle with this challenge by three steps. First, the input trajectory data is classified; second, taxonomy of spatio-temporal patterns is developed from data mining point of view; lastly, the spatio-temporal patterns appeared on the previous publications are discussed and put into the theoretical framework. In this way, researchers can easily find needed methodology to mining specific pattern in this framework; also the algorithms needing to be developed can be identified for further research. Under the guidance of this framework, an application to a real data set from Starkey Project is performed. Two questions are answers by applying data mining algorithms. First is where the elks would like to stay in the whole range, and the second is whether there are corridors among these regions of interest

Mining Spatio-Temporal Datasets: Relevance, Challenges and Current Research Directions

Spatio-temporal data usually records the states over time of an object, an event or a position in space. Spatio-temporal data can be found in several application fields, such as traffic management, environment monitoring, weather forerast, etc. In the past, huge effort was devoted to spatial data representation and manipulation with particular focus on its visualisation. More recently, the interest of many users has shifted from static views of geospatial phenomena, which capture its “spatiality” only, to more advanced means of discovering dynamic relationships among the patterns and events contained in the data as well as understanding the changes occurring in spatial data over time