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

Identifying Inequality of School Facilities and Resource Distribution Problems in Abbottabad City, Pakistan through Geographical Visualization

Providing quality education in isolated areas is one of the major issues in recent times, mainly in the underdeveloped countries, especially in South Asia. As the population is increasing rapidly in Pakistan, the resources cannot meet the requirements of quality education. One such example is the Abbottabad District of Pakistan with 1900 schools in 51 union councils; the government educational authorities have not established any system for their proper management and monitoring. The main reason behind the lack of resource management is the absence of effective visualization systems as well as the distance of schools from the main city. Mapping schools geographically to visualize them for analysis and managing resources is an efficient and effective way to make better decisions. The purpose of this study is to geographically identify the inequality in distribution of school’s facilities and resources that can help educational authorities to diagnose problems when making decision and managing schools. Use of static conventional paper methods has consistently lead to poor results, because it is difficult to manage large amounts of school. In this research, the complete educational data was calculated from both government and local resources and then properly arranged in a database. That database was then connected to a web server to represent it publicly on a web-based application. The resulting map represents the spatial distribution of schools, depicting the improper distribution of almost 25% of the schools in different areas of Abbottabad. This research provides evidence that using GIS aided decision support and recommendation system will facilitate in better resource planning for education in developing nations. Keywords: Geographical Visualization, Resource Management, Geographical Distribution, Abbottabad

Rethinking Similarity Search: Embracing Smarter Mechanisms over Smarter Data

In this vision paper, we propose a shift in perspective for improving the effectiveness of similarity search. Rather than focusing solely on enhancing the data quality, particularly machine learning-generated embeddings, we advocate for a more comprehensive approach that also enhances the underpinning search mechanisms. We highlight three novel avenues that call for a redefinition of the similarity search problem: exploiting implicit data structures and distributions, engaging users in an iterative feedback loop, and moving beyond a single query vector. These novel pathways have gained relevance in emerging applications such as large-scale language models, video clip retrieval, and data labeling. We discuss the corresponding research challenges posed by these new problem areas and share insights from our preliminary discoveries

A MODEL OF FUZZY TOPOLOGICAL RELATIONS FOR SIMPLE SPATIAL OBJECTS IN GIS

The goal of this paper is to present a new model of fuzzy topological relations for simple spatial objects in Geographic Information Sciences (GIS). The concept of computational fuzzy topological space is applied to simple fuzzy objects to efficiently and more accurately solve fuzzy topological relations, extending and improving upon previous research in this area. Firstly, we propose a new definition for simple fuzzy line segments and simple fuzzy regions based on computational fuzzy topology. And then, we also propose a new model to compute fuzzy topological relations between simple spatial objects, an analysis of the new model exposes:(1) the topological relations of two simple crisp objects; (2) the topological relations between one simple crisp object and one simple fuzzy object; (3) the topological relations between two simple fuzzy objects. In the end, we have discussed some examples to demonstrate the validity of the new model, through an experiment and comparisons of existing models, we showed that the proposed method can make finer distinctions, as it is more expressive than the existing fuzzy models