SE-KGE: A Location-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding Model for Geographic Question Answering and Spatial Semantic Lifting

Learning knowledge graph (KG) embeddings is an emerging technique for a variety of downstream tasks such as summarization, link prediction, information retrieval, and question answering. However, most existing KG embedding models neglect space and, therefore, do not perform well when applied to (geo)spatial data and tasks. For those models that consider space, most of them primarily rely on some notions of distance. These models suffer from higher computational complexity during training while still losing information beyond the relative distance between entities. In this work, we propose a location-aware KG embedding model called SE-KGE. It directly encodes spatial information such as point coordinates or bounding boxes of geographic entities into the KG embedding space. The resulting model is capable of handling different types of spatial reasoning. We also construct a geographic knowledge graph as well as a set of geographic query-answer pairs called DBGeo to evaluate the performance of SE-KGE in comparison to multiple baselines. Evaluation results show that SE-KGE outperforms these baselines on the DBGeo dataset for geographic logic query answering task. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our spatially-explicit model and the importance of considering the scale of different geographic entities. Finally, we introduce a novel downstream task called spatial semantic lifting which links an arbitrary location in the study area to entities in the KG via some relations. Evaluation on DBGeo shows that our model outperforms the baseline by a substantial margin.Comment: Accepted to Transactions in GI

Non-Fungible Programs: Private Full-Stack Applications for Web3

The greatest advantage that Web3 applications offer over Web 2.0 is the evolution of the data access layer. Opaque, centralized services that compelled trust from users are replaced by trustless, decentralized systems of smart contracts. However, the public nature of blockchain-based databases, on which smart contracts transact, has typically presented a challenge for applications that depend on data privacy or that rely on participants having incomplete information. This has changed with the introduction of confidential smart contract networks that encrypt the memory state of active contracts as well as their databases stored on-chain. With confidentiality, contracts can more readily implement novel interaction mechanisms that were previously infeasible. Meanwhile, in both Web 2.0 and Web3 applications the user interface continues to play a crucial role in translating user intent into actionable requests. In many cases, developers have shifted intelligence and autonomy into the client-side, leveraging Web technologies for compute, graphics, and networking. Web3’s reliance on such frontends has revealed a pain point though, namely that decentralized applications are not accessible to end users without a persistent host serving the application. Here we introduce the Non-Fungible Program (NFP) model for developing self-contained frontend applications that are distributed via blockchain, powered by Web technology, and backed by private databases persisted in encrypted smart contracts. Access to frontend code, as well as backend services, is controlled and guaranteed by smart contracts according to the NFT ownership model, eliminating the need for a separate host. By extension, NFP applications bring interactivity to token owners and enable new functionalities, such as authorization mechanisms for oracles, supplementary Web services, and overlay networks in a secure manner. In addition to releasing an open-source software development kit for building NFPs, we demonstrate the utility of NFPs with an interactive Bayesian game implemented on Secret Network

Semantically-Enriched Search Engine for Geoportals: A Case Study with ArcGIS Online

Many geoportals such as ArcGIS Online are established with the goal of improving geospatial data reusability and achieving intelligent knowledge discovery. However, according to previous research, most of the existing geoportals adopt Lucene-based techniques to achieve their core search functionality, which has a limited ability to capture the user's search intentions. To better understand a user's search intention, query expansion can be used to enrich the user's query by adding semantically similar terms. In the context of geoportals and geographic information retrieval, we advocate the idea of semantically enriching a user's query from both geospatial and thematic perspectives. In the geospatial aspect, we propose to enrich a query by using both place partonomy and distance decay. In terms of the thematic aspect, concept expansion and embedding-based document similarity are used to infer the implicit information hidden in a user's query. This semantic query expansion 1 2 G. Mai et al. framework is implemented as a semantically-enriched search engine using ArcGIS Online as a case study. A benchmark dataset is constructed to evaluate the proposed framework. Our evaluation results show that the proposed semantic query expansion framework is very effective in capturing a user's search intention and significantly outperforms a well-established baseline-Lucene's practical scoring function-with more than 3.0 increments in DCG@K (K=3,5,10).Comment: 18 pages; Accepted to AGILE 2020 as a full paper GitHub Code Repository: https://github.com/gengchenmai/arcgis-online-search-engin

Computational Time and Space Tradeoffs in Geo Knowledge Graphs

Over the past several years, the Web of Linked Data has continued to grow in size, both in terms of the breadth of domains covered as well as the depth and precision of knowledge. As a consequence to this growth, the community has been led to confront challenges that arise from incorporating large-scale geographic information into knowledge graphs. These challenges include data quality, data storage, data transmission, and the scaling of geospatial query processing. A crucial concern in real-time computing is about striking a balance between the time complexity of algorithms and memory consumption or data storage (i.e., space). Given a computational problem and the domain of its inputs, there are several decisions that researchers, engineers, and practitioners must make based on the constraints of available computational resources, as well as the desired program's `reaction' time for the sake of human-computer interaction. Understanding how to strike such a balance requires a thorough understanding of the data structures and algorithms used to solve a problem. Geospatial data and geospatial queries in particular require innovators to possess deep background knowledge in order to research and develop viable solutions. As a geographic information scientist working with Linked Data, I attempt to improve the quality, accessibility, reliability, and query performance of geographic data in knowledge graphs. In this dissertation, I study three specific trade-offs: (i) whether certain geographic properties and relations should be computed on-demand or materialized beforehand; (ii) whether carefully precomputing topological relations is more useful than providing users with geometries to compute topological relations on-demand; and finally, (iii) whether the challenges of hosting public geographic knowledge graph services on the Web can be mitigated, and at what cost, by a peer-to-peer architecture in which the clients possess more intelligence

Computational Time and Space Tradeoffs in Geo Knowledge Graphs

Over the past several years, the Web of Linked Data has continued to grow in size, both in terms of the breadth of domains covered as well as the depth and precision of knowledge. As a consequence to this growth, the community has been led to confront challenges that arise from incorporating large-scale geographic information into knowledge graphs. These challenges include data quality, data storage, data transmission, and the scaling of geospatial query processing. A crucial concern in real-time computing is about striking a balance between the time complexity of algorithms and memory consumption or data storage (i.e., space). Given a computational problem and the domain of its inputs, there are several decisions that researchers, engineers, and practitioners must make based on the constraints of available computational resources, as well as the desired program's `reaction' time for the sake of human-computer interaction. Understanding how to strike such a balance requires a thorough understanding of the data structures and algorithms used to solve a problem. Geospatial data and geospatial queries in particular require innovators to possess deep background knowledge in order to research and develop viable solutions. As a geographic information scientist working with Linked Data, I attempt to improve the quality, accessibility, reliability, and query performance of geographic data in knowledge graphs. In this dissertation, I study three specific trade-offs: (i) whether certain geographic properties and relations should be computed on-demand or materialized beforehand; (ii) whether carefully precomputing topological relations is more useful than providing users with geometries to compute topological relations on-demand; and finally, (iii) whether the challenges of hosting public geographic knowledge graph services on the Web can be mitigated, and at what cost, by a peer-to-peer architecture in which the clients possess more intelligence

Reimagining GIS Instruction through Concept-Based Learning

Abstract. Research in geographic information science has not yet found clear answers to the questions of what geographic information is about or what a geographic information system (GIS) contains. This lack of consensus makes it especially challenging to teach and learn GIS. Existing pedagogical approaches either focus on the representational level of data (e.g., “raster and vector”) or are too generic (e.g., “geo-referenced information”). This characterization of GIS and its content is difficult for learners to transfer and apply broadly. As instructors, we approach the challenge of teaching GIS from a conceptual basis. We describe our process to develop a set of core concepts of spatial information, which we use to redesign an undergraduate-level introductory GIS course. Our intervention focuses instruction on the kinds of questions that geographic information enables before training students to produce workflows and answers through system commands. The course redesign complements and informs ongoing research on core concepts of spatial information. Our results demonstrate that GIS courses can deliver more than software training, indicating both theoretical gains and didactic challenges. </jats:p