Thematic signatures for cleansing and enriching place-related linked data

There has been significant progress transforming semi-structured data about places into knowledge graphs that can be used in a wide variety of geographic information systems such as digital gazetteers or geographic information retrieval systems. For instance, in addition to information about events, actors, and objects, DBpedia contains data about hundreds of thousands of places from Wikipedia and publishes it as Linked Data. Repositories that store data about places are among the most interlinked hubs on the Linked Data cloud. However, most content about places resides in unstructured natural language text, and therefore it is not captured in these knowledge graphs. Instead, place representations are limited to facts such as their population counts, geographic locations, and relations to other entities, for example, headquarters of companies or historical figures. In this paper, we present a novel method to enrich the information stored about places in knowledge graphs using thematic signatures that are derived from unstructured text through the process of topic modeling. As proof of concept, we demonstrate that this enables the automatic categorization of articles into place types defined in the DBpedia ontology (e.g., mountain) and also provides a mechanism to infer relationships between place types that are not captured in existing ontologies. This method can also be used to uncover miscategorized places, which is a common problem arising from the automatic lifting of unstructured and semi-structured data.     

生态系统服务供给和需求研究进展

生态系统为人类供给产品与服务,人类对其产品与服务形成需求和消费,供需两者共同构成生态系统服务从自然生态系统流向人类社会系统的动态过程。对生态系统服务的供给和需求进行识别、度量、空间化及均衡分析是生态系统服务研究的重要组成部分,有助于生态系统有效管理以及自然资源合理配置,为生态系统服务付费和生态补偿提供理论支撑。本文基于国内外理论和案例研究成果,首先梳理生态系统服务供给和需求的含义,其次总结和对比从供需空间特征角度对生态系统服务的分类,并归纳生态系统供给和需求的空间化方法,最后从实际供给和潜在供给、实现需求和总量需求、供需数量和空间关系3个方面探讨生态系统服务供需均衡分析框架。     

Enabling maps/location searches on mobile devices: constructing a POI database via focused crawling and information extraction

With the popularity of mobile devices and smartphones, we have witnessed rapid growth in mobile applications and services, especially in location-based services (LBS). According to a mobile marketing survey, maps/location searches are among the most utilized services on smartphones. Points of interest (POIs), such as stores, shops, gas stations, parking lots, and bus stops, are particularly important for maps/location searches. Existing map services such as Google Maps and Wikimapia are constructed manually either professionally or with crowd sourcing. However, manual annotation is costly and limited in current POI search services. With the abundance of information on the Web, many store POIs can be extracted from the Web. In this paper, we focus on automatically constructing a POI database to enable store POI map searches. We propose techniques that are required to construct a POI database, including focused crawling, information extraction, and information retrieval techniques. We first crawl Yellow Page web sites to obtain vocabularies of store names. These vocabularies are then investigated with search engines to obtain sentences containing these store names from search snippets in order to train a store name recognition model. To extract POIs scattered across the Web, we propose a query-based crawler to find address-bearing pages that might be used to extract addresses and store names. We crawled 1.25 million distinct POI pairs scattered across the Web and implemented a POI search service via Apache Lucent’s search platform, called Solr. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed geographical information retrieval model outperforms Wikimapia and a commercial app called ‘What’s the Number?’     

Enriching user profiles using geo-social place semantics in geo-folksonomies

Geo-folksonomies link social web users to geographic places through the tags users choose to label the places with. These tags can be a valuable source of information about the user’s perception of place and can reflect their experiences and activities in the places they label. By analysing the associations between users, places and tags, an understanding of a place and its relationships with other places can be drawn. This place characterisation is unique, dynamic and reflects the perception of a particular user community that generated the geo-folksonomy. In this work, an approach is proposed to analysing geo-folksonomies that builds on and extends existing statistical methods by considering specific concepts of relevance to geographic place resources, namely, place types and place-related activities, and by building a place ontology to encode those concepts and relationships. The folksonomy analysis and evaluation are demonstrated using a realistic geo-folksonomy data set. The resulting ontology is used to build user profiles from the folksonomy. The derived profiles reflect the association between users and the specific places they tag as well as other places with relevant associated place type and activities. The methods proposed here provide the potential for many interesting and useful applications, including the harvesting of useful insight on geographic space and employing the derived user profiles to enhance the search experience and to identify similarities between users based on their association to geographic places.     

Airborne near-real-time monitoring of assembly and parking areas in case of large-scale public events and natural disasters

A critical requirement for an effective and coordinated response by public entities tasked with management, security, and relief during large-scale public events or natural disasters is the availability of current situational information. However, today there is a lack of comprehensive operational systems allowing a near-real-time (NRT) collection, visualization, and provision of situational information for larger areas. In this study a methodological framework is proposed, which allows an NRT extraction and visualization of situational information based on aerial image acquisition. The framework combines digital image analysis using a generic supervised information extraction approach based on statistical modeling with a downstream web-based visualization component realized through an automatic update of web services. Even though being applicable for different scenarios, the workflow will be demonstrated for the specific use-case of a NRT monitoring of open spaces including assembly and parking areas. Compared to other approaches, image analysis results indicate a high robustness and a low demand for computational power sources (7 seconds per image). Due to a high degree of automation, the proposed workflow contributes to a NRT ‘end-to-end’ monitoring system, which was developed within the VABENE (German acronym for ‘traffic management under large-scale public events and disaster conditions’) project covering all parts from the acquisition of raw aerial imagery to the dissemination of information products to end-users.     

地理本体及其应用初探

将本体论的思想和方法引入到地理信息领域,提出了本体论在地理信息科学中的确切含义,并阐述了建立地理本体的意义。重点研究了基于本体的地理信息服务,并在对各种本体表示语言进行分析比较之后,选择最有发展前景的OWL语言构建了一些简单的地理本体,用实例说明如何将本体应用到地理信息服务中。     

GeoCorpora: building a corpus to test and train microblog geoparsers

In this article, we present the GeoCorpora corpus building framework and software tools as well as a geo-annotated Twitter corpus built with these tools to foster research and development in the areas of microblog/Twitter geoparsing and geographic information retrieval. The developed framework employs crowdsourcing and geovisual analytics to support the construction of large corpora of text in which the mentioned location entities are identified and geolocated to toponyms in existing geographical gazetteers. We describe how the approach has been applied to build a corpus of geo-annotated tweets that will be made freely available to the research community alongside this article to support the evaluation, comparison and training of geoparsers. Additionally, we report lessons learned related to corpus construction for geoparsing as well as insights about the notions of place and natural spatial language that we derive from application of the framework to building this corpus.     

A fuzzy formal concept analysis-based approach to uncovering spatial hierarchies among vague places extracted from user-generated data

The spatial hierarchy of part-whole relationships is an essential characteristic of the platial world. Constructing spatial hierarchies of places is valuable in association analysis and qualitative spatial reasoning. The emergence of large amounts of geotagged user-generated content provides strong support for modelling places. However, the vague nature of places and the complex spatial relationships among places make it intractable to understand and represent the hierarchies among places. In this paper, we introduce a fuzzy formal concept analysis-based approach to uncovering the spatial hierarchies among vague places. Each place is represented as a concept that consists of its extent and its intent. Based on the place concepts, the spatial hierarchies are generated and expressed as a graph that is easy to comprehend and contains abundant information on spatial relations. We also demonstrate the rationality of our result by comparing it with the result of a questionnaire survey.     

Analysis of spatial patterns of public attention on housing prices in Chinese cities: A web search engine approach

Housing price has become one of the most pressing issues facing urban residents in China in recent years and received considerable attention. However, detailed housing price data are often ill-documented or unavailable for the public, thus posing a grand challenge for the study of housing prices in China. Because individuals' Internet search activities can be recorded by web search engines, the analysis of these web search activities in cyber-space may provide a means of better understanding public attention and associated concerns in real geographic space. In this study, we focus on exploring the spatial patterns of public attention on housing price through the analysis of web query activities based on Baidu Index, a Chinese keyword analysis tool from Baidu web search engine. We propose a new index based on keyword query outcome from Baidu search database to analyze spatially heterogeneous patterns of housing price attention from 19 large and medium-sized cities in China. We evaluate the spatial network structure of housing price attention, and develop a new index to measure the intensity of interaction relationships among cities of interest. Our results show that spatial interactions of housing price attention between cities evaluated using the new method are consistent with those from a gravity model. Meanwhile, as revealed from Baidu Index-based indicators, strong spatial association patterns exist among cities that form urban agglomerations. Further, our results demonstrate that the web search engine approach, based on the coupling of cyber-space and geographic space, provides solid support for the study of housing price attention and its spatially explicit patterns in China.     

A natural language processing and geospatial clustering framework for harvesting local place names from geotagged housing advertisements

Local place names are frequently used by residents living in a geographic region. Such place names may not be recorded in existing gazetteers, due to their vernacular nature, relative insignificance to a gazetteer covering a large area (e.g. the entire world), recent establishment (e.g. the name of a newly-opened shopping center) or other reasons. While not always recorded, local place names play important roles in many applications, from supporting public participation in urban planning to locating victims in disaster response. In this paper, we propose a computational framework for harvesting local place names from geotagged housing advertisements. We make use of those advertisements posted on local-oriented websites, such as Craigslist, where local place names are often mentioned. The proposed framework consists of two stages: natural language processing (NLP) and geospatial clustering. The NLP stage examines the textual content of housing advertisements and extracts place name candidates. The geospatial stage focuses on the coordinates associated with the extracted place name candidates and performs multiscale geospatial clustering to filter out the non-place names. We evaluate our framework by comparing its performance with those of six baselines. We also compare our result with four existing gazetteers to demonstrate the not-yet-recorded local place names discovered by our framework.     

生态系统退化的人类响应（英文）

生态系统为人类提供了必要的服务,其中大部分是没有市场价格的,因此被认为是"自然的免费赠品"而被大量使用。近年来由于快速的工业化和城市化,不断增长的人口已经使人们认识到生态系统服务也是有限的。环境退化是用来描述生态系统服务的损失或损害的常用指标,而移民往往是环境恶化的后果。那么,生态系统服务退化到什么程度才足以导致人们搬迁?本文通过对移民和环境退化相关文献的综述,力求寻求及时监测生态系统退化状况、避免人类承受生态移民痛苦、探求不同环境下人类更好地生存与发展的途径。     

Task-oriented information value measurement based on space-time prisms

Recent years have witnessed a large increase in the amount of information available from the Web and many other sources. Such an information deluge presents a challenge for individuals who have to identify useful information items to complete particular tasks in hand. Information value theory (IVT) from economics and artificial intelligence has provided some guidance on this issue. However, existing IVT studies often focus on monetary values, while ignoring the spatiotemporal properties which can play important roles in everyday tasks. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for task-oriented information value measurement. This framework integrates IVT with the space-time prism from time geography and measures the value of information based on its impact on an individual’s space-time prisms and its capability of improving task planning. We develop and formalize this framework by extending the utility function from space-time accessibility studies and elaborate it using a simplified example from time geography. We conduct a simulation on a real-world transportation network using the proposed framework. Our research could be applied to improving information display on small-screen mobile devices (e.g., smartwatches) by assigning priorities to different information items.     

A participatory framework for developing public participation GIS solutions to improve resource management systems

Participatory approaches elicit information from multiple stakeholders while planning and implementing resource management systems. Such elicited information is often associated with significant variability. Public participation geographical information science (GIS) (PP-GIS) solutions can reduce this variability by helping stakeholders to measure the factors involved and provide the elicited information. We propose a ‘Quality Function Deployment’-based participatory framework for developing such PP-GIS solutions. It is demonstrated using a case study to enhance an existing PP-GIS into a solution for rainwater harvesting systems in Indian villages. The novelty of the proposed framework is that it identifies metrics and carries out comparative analysis of three existing solutions: participatory rural appraisal, participatory mapping and PP-GIS. In the case study, PP-GIS scored less than participatory mapping as it scored less on usability and affordability. To improve PP-GIS in these aspects, an easy-to-use mobile and web based, free and open source PP-GIS solution, Watershed GIS, was developed. It scored better than the three existing solutions and its usage resulted in substantial reduction of variability in criteria values and thus better ranking of alternatives, with the average coefficient of variation decreasing from 0.12 to 0.05.     

Factors Inhibiting Local Government Engagement in Environmental Sustainability: case studies from rural Australia

The literature on local government management of the environment in Australia has been limited in that it has typically focused on the urban sphere. In contrast, this paper places rurality at the centre of its inquiry. It uses data from 15 case studies of rural local governments in Australia to identify the main factors that inhibit natural resource management by rural councils. These barriers mobilise around four key themes: capacity, commitment, co-ordination and community. While many of the issues raised in this study of non-urban shires have been described in previous research, the paper argues that the geographic location of the areas under investigation aggravates barriers to engaging sustainability initiatives. It is contended that rural local governments need to be resourced accordingly to ensure that natural resource management at the local government level in Australia is not compromised.     

A Voronoi neighborhood-based search heuristic for distance/capacity constrained very large vehicle routing problems

Local search heuristics for very large-scale vehicle routing problems (VRPs) have made remarkable advances in recent years. However, few local search heuristics have focused on the use of the spatial neighborhood in Voronoi diagrams to improve local searches. Based on the concept of a k-ring shaped Voronoi neighbor, we propose a Voronoi spatial neighborhood-based search heuristic and algorithm to solve very large-scale VRPs. In this algorithm, k-ring Voronoi neighbors of a customer are limited to building and updating local routings, and rearranging local routings with improper links. This algorithm was evaluated using four sets of benchmark tests for 200–8683 customers. Solutions were compared with specific examples in the literature, such as the one-depot VRP. This algorithm produced better solutions than some of the best-known benchmark VRP solutions and requires less computational time. The algorithm outperformed previous methods used to solve very large-scale, real-world distance constrained capacitated VRP.     

Tuning the second-generation SDI: theoretical aspects and real use cases

Spatial data infrastructure (SDI) actors have great expectations for the second-generation SDI currently under development. However, SDIs have many implementation problems at different levels that are delaying the development of the SDI framework. The aims of this article are to identify these difficulties, in the literature and based on our own experience, in order to determine how mature and useful the current SDI phenomena are. We can then determine whether a general reconceptualization is necessary or rather a set of technical improvements and good practices needs to be developed before the second-generation SDI is completed. This study is based on the following aspects: metadata about data and services, data models, data download, data and processing services, data portrayal and symbolization, and mass market aspects. This work aims to find an equilibrium between user-focused geoportals and web service interconnection (the user side vs. the server side). These deep reflections are motivated by a use case in the healthcare area in which we employed the Catalan regional SDI. The use case shows that even one of the best regional SDI implementations can fail to provide the required information and processes even when the required data exist. Several previous studies recognize the value of applying Web 2.0 and user participation approaches but few of these studies provide a real implementation. Another objective of this work is to show that it is easy to complement the classical, international standard-based SDI with a participative Web 2.0 approach. To do so, we present a mash-up portal built on top of the Catalan SDI catalogues.     

RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY: THE IMPACTS OF WEB-BASED INFORMATION ON THE SEARCH PROCESS AND SPATIAL HOUSING CHOICE PATTERNS

In the past few years, a vastly enriched information source on housing vacancies has become available through real estate industry-sponsored sites on the Internet. This rich information source has the potential to influence spatial patterns and processes in the search for housing by eliminating information barriers in the search process. Thirty years ago, geographers documented the constraints to the search process caused by limited or biased information fields. The question addressed by this research was whether this new information availability would change the search patterns documented in the 1970s. In order to investigate this question recent movers in Wake County, North Carolina, were surveyed in early 2000, and the characteristics of Web users were compared with nonusers. The major finding of this research is that to date, the Internet has had little impact on search patterns, except that those using the Internet tend to visit a larger number of houses personally than those who do not use the World Wide Web as an information source. [Key words: residential mobility, housing search, Internet.]