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

Investigating behavioural and computational approaches for defining imprecise regions

People often communicate with reference to informally agreedplaces, such as “the city centre”. However, views of the spatial extent of such areas may vary, resulting in imprecise regions. We compare perceptions of Sheffield’s City Centre from a street survey to extents derived from various web-based sources. Such automated approaches have advantages of speed, cost and repeatability. We show that footprints from web sources are often in concordance with models derived from more labour-intensive methods. Notable exceptions however were found with sources advertising or selling residential property. Agreement between sources was measured by aggregating them to identify locations of consensus

A APLICAÇÃO DA RESERVA DO POSSÍVEL EM FACE DO DIREITO SOCIAL FUNDAMENTAL DA SAÚDE E DO MÍNIMO EXISTENCIAL

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-10T10:46:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 VALDIR JOSE DE MEDEIROS FILHO.pdf: 543399 bytes, checksum: 688bf108e2548a5e73b08c35d5d050d2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-03-14The right of health was raised by the National Constitution of 1988 for the category of fundamental rights with immediate applicability as shown in the first paragraph of the fifth article of our Constitution. The immediate applicability of these fundamental social rights annihilated the programmatic character of these constitutional laws that establish the right to health. In this way, from a systemic view of the Brazilian legal system, balancing the nature of the principles laws that establish these fundamental social rights, can confirm that the principle of human dignity and of the minimum existential are discarded the thesis of the reserve for the possible advocated by the State, for not to put into practice the public health services that do grow these social rights. Because of the inertia of the State for to provide the public health services by the reason of insufficient funds to provide these services, the protection exercised in relation to decisions and interpretations of laws made by higher courts take energetic and active position in defense of society, and these are public services that guarantee the social rights, ordered and implemented by the Judiciary. Judges of first instance and superior courts, replacing the representatives of government, constitutionally responsible for the effectiveness of these fundamental rights, started to determine the respect to the commands of the Federal Constitution regarding the rights of health, invoking in opposition to the thesis of reserve for the possible or insufficiency of funds, the principle of human dignity and the minimum existential.O direito social da saúde foi alçado pela Constituição Federal de 1988, à categoria de direito fundamental com aplicabilidade imediata, conforme prescreve o parágrafo primeiro do artigo quinto de nosso texto constitucional. Esse viés da aplicabilidade imediata desse direito fundamental social contribuiu para aniquilar o caráter programático das normas constitucionais que estabelecem o direito fundamental à saúde. Por essa via, a partir de uma visão sistêmica do ordenamento jurídico brasileiro sopesando a natureza principiológica das normas que estabelecem esse direito social fundamental, verifica-se que o princípio da dignidade da pessoa humana e do mínimo existencial vêm afastando a tese da reserva do possível defendida pelo Estado, para não implementação e entrega dos serviços públicos de saúde que densificam esse direito social. Em razão dessa inércia do Estado (Poder Executivo) prestar serviços públicos de saúde alegando a insuficiência de verba (reserva do possível), a tutela jurisdicional assume posição enérgica e atuante em defesa da sociedade, sendo esses serviços públicos que garantem o direito à saúde, ordenados e implementados pelo Poder Judiciário. Juízes de primeiro grau e dos tribunais superiores, em substituição aos representantes do poder Executivo, responsáveis constitucionalmente pela efetividade desses direitos fundamentais determinam o respeito aos mandamentos da Constituição Federal relativos ao direito social da saúde, invocando em contra-argumentação a tese da reserva do possível, o princípio da dignidade da pessoa humana e o mínimo existencial

Voronoi-based region approximation for geographical information retrieval with gazetteers

Gazetteers and geographical thesauri can be regarded as parsimonious spatial models that associate geographical location with place names and encode some semantic relations between the names. They are of particular value in processing information retrieval requests in which the user employs place names to specify geographical context. Typically the geometric locational data in a gazetteer are confined to a simple footprint in the form of a centroid or a minimum bounding rectangle, both of which can be used to link to a map but are of limited value in determining spatial relationships. Here we describe a Voronoi diagram method for generating approximate regional extents from sets of centroids that are respectively inside and external to a region. The resulting approximations provide measures of areal extent and can be used to assist in answering geographical queries by evaluating spatial relationships such as distance, direction and common boundary length. Preliminary experimental evaluations of the method have been performed in the context of a semantic modelling system that combines the centroid data with hierarchical and adjacency relations between the associated place names

Modelling vague places with knowledge from the Web

Place names are often used to describe and to enquire about geographical information. It is common for users to employ vernacular names that have vague spatial extent and which do not correspond to the official and administrative place name terminology recorded within typical gazetteers. There is a need therefore to enrich gazetteers with knowledge of such vague places and hence improve the quality of place name-based information retrieval. Here we describe a method for modelling vague places using knowledge harvested from web pages. It is found that vague place names are frequently accompanied in text by the names of more precise co-located places that lie within the extent of the target vague place. Density surface modelling of the frequency of co- occurrence of such names provides an effective method of representing the inherent uncertainty of the extent of the vague place while also enabling approximate crisp boundaries to be derived from contours if required. The method is evaluated using both precise and vague places. The use of the resulting approximate boundaries is demonstrated using an experimental geographical search engine

Historical GIS: Structuring, mapping and analysing geographies of the past.

The last 10 years have seen a sudden rise in interest in the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in historical research. This has led to a field that has become known as `historical GIS'. This development started in the more quantitative ends of the discipline but has spread to encompass qualitative research as well. Interest in historical GIS is not restricted to researchers who would previously have regarded themselves as historical geographers, but has in fact led to an increased awareness of the importance of geography from across the discipline of history. This paper introduces historical GIS and critically evaluates how it is affecting the practice of historical geography