60,859 research outputs found
Space-contained conflict revision, for geographic information
Using qualitative reasoning with geographic information, contrarily, for
instance, with robotics, looks not only fastidious (i.e.: encoding knowledge
Propositional Logics PL), but appears to be computational complex, and not
tractable at all, most of the time. However, knowledge fusion or revision, is a
common operation performed when users merge several different data sets in a
unique decision making process, without much support. Introducing logics would
be a great improvement, and we propose in this paper, means for deciding -a
priori- if one application can benefit from a complete revision, under only the
assumption of a conjecture that we name the "containment conjecture", which
limits the size of the minimal conflicts to revise. We demonstrate that this
conjecture brings us the interesting computational property of performing a
not-provable but global, revision, made of many local revisions, at a tractable
size. We illustrate this approach on an application.Comment: 14 page
The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis
We present, visualize and analyse the similarities and differences between
the controversial topics related to "edit wars" identified in 10 different
language versions of Wikipedia. After a brief review of the related work we
describe the methods developed to locate, measure, and categorize the
controversial topics in the different languages. Visualizations of the degree
of overlap between the top 100 lists of most controversial articles in
different languages and the content related to geographical locations will be
presented. We discuss what the presented analysis and visualizations can tell
us about the multicultural aspects of Wikipedia and practices of
peer-production. Our results indicate that Wikipedia is more than just an
encyclopaedia; it is also a window into convergent and divergent social-spatial
priorities, interests and preferences.Comment: This is a draft of a book chapter to be published in 2014 by
Scarecrow Press. Please cite as: Yasseri T., Spoerri A., Graham M., and
Kert\'esz J., The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and
geographical analysis. In: Fichman P., Hara N., editors, Global
Wikipedia:International and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration.
Scarecrow Press (2014
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
Understanding the origins and pace of Africa’s urban transition
In this paper the author argues that urbanisation should be understood as a global historical process driven primarily by population dynamics stimulated by technological and institutional change. In particular, disease control and expanded access to surplus energy supplies are necessary and sufficient conditions for urbanisation to occur given historical evidence of an inherent human propensity to agglomerate. Economic development, which has traditionally been viewed as the primary driving force behind urbanisation, can accelerate the process but is not a necessary condition for it to occur. Informed by this historically-grounded theory of urbanisation, a range of qualitative and quantitative evidence is used to explain the stylised facts of sub-Saharan Africa's urban transition, namely the late onset of urbanisation in Africa vis-a-vis other major world regions, the widely noted but inadequately explained phenomenon of 'urbanisation without growth' observed in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, and the historically unprecedented rates of urban population growth seen in the region throughout the late twentieth century
Biological Individuals
The impressive variation amongst biological individuals generates many complexities in addressing the simple-sounding question what is a biological individual? A distinction between evolutionary and physiological individuals is useful in thinking about biological individuals, as is attention to the kinds of groups, such as superorganisms and species, that have sometimes been thought of as biological individuals. More fully understanding the conceptual space that biological individuals occupy also involves considering a range of other concepts, such as life, reproduction, and agency. There has been a focus in some recent discussions by both philosophers and biologists on how evolutionary individuals are created and regulated, as well as continuing work on the evolution of individuality
Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services
One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS).
WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global
distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS
resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and
performed distributed performance monitoring of these services. This paper
explicates a distributed monitoring framework that was used to monitor 46,296
WMSs continuously for over one year and a crawling method to discover these
WMSs. We analyzed server locations, provider types, themes, the spatiotemporal
coverage of map layers and the service versions for 41,703 valid WMSs.
Furthermore, we appraised the stability and performance of basic operations for
1210 selected WMSs (i.e., GetCapabilities and GetMap). We discuss the major
reasons for request errors and performance issues, as well as the relationship
between service response times and the spatiotemporal distribution of client
monitoring sites. This paper will help service providers, end users and
developers of standards to grasp the status of global WMS resources, as well as
to understand the adoption status of OGC standards. The conclusions drawn in
this paper can benefit geospatial resource discovery, service performance
evaluation and guide service performance improvements.Comment: 24 pages; 15 figure
Ibero-American Research on Local Development. An Analysis of Its Evolution and New Trends
Local development is a subject that arouses significant interest in the international scientific community in general, and in the Ibero-American one, in particular. The process of globalization has transformed the management of local development, altering the role that is played by local and regional entities, and it is the object of an important follow-up and analysis by academia. This research uses a bibliometric methodology and a fractional counting method, reviewing the 738 articles from the Scopus database in order to understand the state of Ibero-American research on local development, and analyze the scientific literature on the topic. The results show a significant increase in the number of publications in the 21st century, with Spain and Brazil leading the way. In addition, this research provides interesting results regarding the most influential authors on this topic, the most relevant journals, and the most important institutions and funding organizations. There are several areas of knowledge involved since local development is a transversal field, such as Social Science, environment, business, economics, and agriculture. A deep analysis of authors’ keywords identified new trends, linking local development with tourism, education, geotourism, climate change, local sustainable development, social innovation, and creativity, which provides academia with potential new lines of research
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