How human schematization and systematic errors take effect on sketch map formalizations

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesSketch map is an important way to represent spatial information used in many geospatial reasoning tasks (Forbus, K., Usher, J., & Chapman, V. 2004). Compared with verbal or textual language, sketch map is a more interactive mode that more directly supports human spatial thinking and thus is a more natural way to reflect how people perceive properties of spatial objects and their spatial relations. One challenging application of sketch maps is called Spatial-Query-by-Sketch proposed by Egenhofer. Being a design of query language for geographic information systems (GISs), it allows a user to formulate a spatial query by drawing the desired spatial configuration with a pen on a touch-sensitive computer screen and get it translated into a symbolic representation to be processed against a geographic database (Egenhofer, M. 1997). During the period of sketch map drawing, errors due to human spatial cognition in mind may occur. A ready example is as follows: distance judgments for route are judged longer when the route has many turns or landmarks or intersections (Tversky, B. 2002). Direction get straightened up in memory. When Parisians were asked to sketch maps of their city, the Seine was drawn as a curve, but straighter than it actually is (Milgram, S. and Jodelet, D. 1976). Similarly, buildings and streets with different shapes are often simply depicted as schematic figures like blobs and lines. These errors are neither random nor due solely to ignorance; rather they appear to be a consequence of ordinary perceptual and cognitive processes (Tversky, 2003). Therefore, when processing sketch map analysis and representing it in a formal way, like Egenhofer's analysis approach for Spatial-Query-by-Sketch, the resulting formalization must necessarily be wrong if it does not account for the fact that some spatial information is distorted or omitted by humans. Therefore, when sketch map analysis is processed and represented in a formal way same as Egenhofer’s analytical approach to Spatial-Query-by-Sketch, the resulting formalization is simply erroneous since it never takes into account the fact that some spatial information is distorted or neglected in human perceptions. Though Spatial-Query-by-Sketch overcomes the limitations of conventional spatial query language by taking into consideration those alternative interaction methods between users and data, it is still not always true that accuracy of its query results is reliable.(...

SVIQUEL: A Spacial Visual Query and Exploration Language

Abstract The need to analyze and query spatial data is becoming increasingly important with the advent of applications such as Geographic Information Systems Image Databases and Remote Sensing The focus of our research is to support spatial data analysis by developing a direct manipulation environment to visually query as well as browse spatial data and to review the visual results for trend analysis In this paper we present a visual query language SVIQUELE which allows us to specify the relative spatial position both topology and directionE between objects using direct manipulation This query language builds upon the notion of dynamic query lters and signi cantly extends them to support integrated querying of both topological and directional types of spatial data In order to facilitate continuous querying as required by a direct manipulation environment we designed an integrated neighborhood model for both kinds of spatial relationships topology and directionE Our spatial query palette SVIQUEL allows us to query over any of the continuous sets of neighboring values SVIQUEL is complimented by a Spatial Query Disambiguation diagram SQUADE which gives qualitative visual representations of the quantitative query This increases the utility of the system for spatial browsing of data with no particular query in mind Mapping functions between the quantitative SVIQUEL and the qualitative SQUAD have been developed The resulting tight coupling between SVIQUEL and SQUAD allows the users to work with either qualitative query speci cations or at a quantitative level of detail depending on his particular needs as well as to freely switch between the two while working in a continuous data exploration mod

Application of universal ontology of geographic space in a subset of the first-order predicate calculus\ud

Spatial data sources, like the geodetic reference system,\ud administrative spatial units, addresses and topographic\ud maps, serve as a base for geo-referencing to the most of\ud dependant thematic spatial databases. The marketing\ud strategy of the surveying profession towards the users of\ud spatial data infrastructure should be in the design of an\ud integrative semantic reference system to be used within\ud the Semantic Web, or so-called Web 3.0. The main\ud motivation for our research was the representation of\ud possibilities to automate tool development for efficient\ud and more sensible approaches to query information\ud within web-published spatial data. In contemporary\ud research there are several solutions offered as upgrades\ud of basic GIS systems with the knowledge presented in\ud the form of ontologies. Therefore, we are faced with\ud the new generation of GIS technology, which has been\ud named "inteligent GIS". In this article, we present\ud method of modelling the semantic reference system\ud as an application of the ontology of geographic space\ud in the subset of first order predicate calculus. Such\ud a semantic network of geographic space represents\ud the foundation for semantic data analyses and data\ud integration in distributed information systems. Our\ud application is based on the methods of machine\ud learning and use of the Prolog programming language

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

An Ontology for Grounding Vague Geographic Terms

Many geographic terms, such as “river” and “lake”, are vague, with no clear boundaries of application. In particular, the spatial extent of such features is often vaguely carved out of a continuously varying observable domain. We present a means of defining vague terms using standpoint semantics, a refinement of the philosophical idea of supervaluation semantics. Such definitions can be grounded in actual data by geometric analysis and segmentation of the data set. The issues raised by this process with regard to the nature of boundaries and domains of logical quantification are discussed. We describe a prototype implementation of a system capable of segmenting attributed polygon data into geographically significant regions and evaluating queries involving vague geographic feature terms

GeoCLEF 2007: the CLEF 2007 cross-language geographic information retrieval track overview

GeoCLEF ran as a regular track for the second time within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2007. The purpose of GeoCLEF is to test and evaluate cross-language geographic information retrieval (GIR): retrieval for topics with a geographic specification. GeoCLEF 2007 consisted of two sub tasks. A search task ran for the third time and a query classification task was organized for the first. For the GeoCLEF 2007 search task, twenty-five search topics were defined by the organizing groups for searching English, German, Portuguese and Spanish document collections. All topics were translated into English, Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish and German. Several topics in 2007 were geographically challenging. Thirteen groups submitted 108 runs. The groups used a variety of approaches. For the classification task, a query log from a search engine was provided and the groups needed to identify the queries with a geographic scope and the geographic components within the local queries

Designing data warehouses for geographic OLAP querying by using MDA

Data aggregation in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a desirable feature, spatial data are integrated in OLAP engines for this purpose. However, the development and operation of those systems is still a complex task due to methodologies followed. There are some ad hoc solutions that deal only with isolated aspects and do not provide developer and analyst with an intuitive, integrated and standard framework for designing all relevant parts. To overcome these problems, we have defined a model driven approach to accomplish Geographic Data Warehouse (GDW) development. Then, we have defined a data model required to implement and query spatial data. Its modeling is defined and implemented by using an extension of UML metamodel and it is also formalized by using OCL language. In addition, the proposal has been verified against a example scenario with sample data sets. For this purpose, we have accomplished a developing tool based on Eclipse platform and MDA standard. The great advantage of this solution is that developers can directly include spatial data at conceptual level, while decision makers can also conceptually make geographic queries without being aware of logical details.This work has been partially supported by the ESPIA project (TIN2007-67078) from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and by the QUASIMODO project (PAC08-0157-0668) from the Castilla-La Mancha Ministry of Education and Science (Spain). Octavio Glorio is funded by the University of Alicante under the 11th Latin American grant program