Search

The improvement of search engines for geospatial data on the World Wide Web has been a subject of research, particularly concerning the challenges in discovering and utilizing geospatial web services. Despite the establishment of standards by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the implementation of these services varies significantly among providers, leading to issues in dataset discoverability and usability. This paper presents a proof of concept for a search engine tailored to geospatial services in Switzerland. It addresses challenges such as scraping data from various OGC web service providers, enhancing metadata quality through Natural Language Processing, and optimizing search functionality and ranking methods. Semantic augmentation techniques are applied to enhance metadata completeness and quality, which are stored in a high-performance NoSQL database for efficient data retrieval. The results show improvements in dataset discoverability and search relevance, with NLP-extracted information contributing significantly to ranking accuracy. Overall, the GeoHarvester proof of concept demonstrates the feasibility of improving the discoverability and usability of geospatial web services through advanced search engine techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological site text is the main carrier of archaeological data at present, which contains rich information. How to efficiently extract useful knowledge from the massive unstructured archaeological site texts is of great significance for the mining and reuse of archaeological information. According to the site information (such as name, location, cultural type, dynasty, etc.) recorded in the Chinese archaeological site text, this paper combines deep learning and natural language processing techniques to study the information extraction method for automatically obtaining the spatio-temporal information of sites. The initial construction of the corpus of Chinese archaeological site text is completed for the first time, and the corpus is input into the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory with Conditional Random Fields (BiLSTM-CRF) entity recognition model and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units with Dual Attention (BiGRU-Dual Attention) relationship extraction model for training. The F1 values of BiLSTM-CRF model and BiGRU-Dual Attention model on the test set reach 87.87% and 88.05%, respectively. The study demonstrates that the information extraction method proposed in this paper is feasible for the Chinese archaeological site texts, which promotes the establishment of knowledge graphs in archaeology and provides new methods and ideas for the development of information mining technology in archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important carrier of individual information, the resume is an important data source for studying the spatio-temporal evolutionary characteristics of individual and group behaviors. This study focuses on spatio-temporal information extraction and geoparsing from resumes to provide basic technical support for spatio-temporal research based on resume text. Most current studies on resume text information extraction are oriented toward recruitment work, such as the automated information extraction, classification, and recommendation of resumes. These studies ignore the spatio-temporal information of individual and group behaviors implied in resumes. Therefore, this study takes the public resumes of teachers in key universities in China as the research data, proposes a set of spatio-temporal information extraction solutions for electronic resumes of public figures, and designs a spatial entity geoparsing method, which can effectively extract and spatially locate spatio-temporal information in the resumes. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, text information extraction models such as BiLSTM-CRF, BERT-CRF, and BERT-BiLSTM-CRF are selected to conduct comparative experiments, and the spatial entity geoparsing method is verified. The experimental results show that the precision of the selected models on the named entity recognition task is 96.23% and the precision of the designed spatial entity geoparsing method is 97.91%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Address matching continues to play a central role at various levels, through geocoding and data integration from different sources, with a view to promote activities such as urban planning, location-based services, and the construction of databases like those used in census operations. However, the task of address matching continues to face several challenges, such as non-standard or incomplete address records or addresses written in more complex languages. In order to better understand how current limitations can be overcome, this paper conducted a systematic literature review focused on automated approaches to address matching and their evolution across time. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were followed, resulting in a final set of 41 papers published between 2002 and 2021, the great majority of which are after 2017, with Chinese authors leading the way. The main findings revealed a consistent move from more traditional approaches to deep learning methods based on semantics, encoder-decoder architectures, and attention mechanisms, as well as the very recent adoption of hybrid approaches making an increased use of spatial constraints and entities. The adoption of evolutionary-based approaches and privacy preserving methods stand as some of the research gaps to address in future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 outbreak followed by the strict citywide lockdown in Shanghai has sparked negative emotion surges on social media platforms in 2022. This research aims to investigate the spatial–temporal heterogeneity of a unique emotion (helplessness) and its built environment determinants. First, we scraped about twenty thousand Weibo posts and utilized their sentiments with natural language processing (NLP) to extract helplessness emotion and investigated its spatial–temporal variations. Second, we tested whether "helplessness" was related with urban environment attributes when other real estate economic and demographic variables were controlled using the ordinary least squares (OLS) model. Our results confirmed that helplessness emotion peaked in early April when the lockdown started. Second, residents in neighborhoods characterized by higher rents and property management fees, higher population density, lower housing prices, lower plot ratios, or surrounded by less tree view and higher perceived visual complexity, are found to exhibit higher degree of "helplessness". This study provides an effective data-driven framework to utilize social media data for public sentiments monitoring. The helplessness emotion identified is a unique mental distress under strict quarantine measures, which expands the growing literature of urban governance in the post-pandemic era. Decision makers should pay attention to public opinions and design tailored management measures with reference to civic emotion dynamics to facilitate social sustainability and resilience in face of future crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural hazards can present a significant risk to road infrastructure. This infrastructure is a fundamental component of the transportation infrastructure, with significant importance. During emergencies, society heavily relies on the functionality of the road infrastructure to facilitate evacuation and access to emergency facilities. This study introduces a versatile, multi-scale framework designed to analyze accessibility within road networks during natural hazard scenarios. The first module of the framework focuses on assessing the influence of natural hazards on road infrastructure to identify damaged or blocked road segments and intersections. It relies on near real-time information, often provided by citizen science through Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) data and Natural Language Processing (NLP) of VGI texts. The second module conducts network analysis based on freely available Open Street Map (OSM) data, differentiating between intact and degraded road networks. Four accessibility measures are employed: betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, a free-flow assumption index, and a novel alternative routing assumption measure considering congestion scenarios. The study showcases its framework through an exemplary application in California, the United States, considering different hazard scenarios, where degraded roads and connected roads impacted by the hazard can be identified. The road extraction methodology allows the extraction of 75% to 100% of the impacted roads mentioned in VGI text messages for the respective case studies. In addition to the directly extracted impacted roads, constructing the degraded network also involves finding road segments that overlap with hazard impact zones, as these are at risk of being impacted. Conducting the network analysis with the four different measures on the intact and degraded network, changes in network accessibility due to the impacts of hazards can be identified. The results show that using each measure is justified, as each measure could demonstrate the accessibility change. However, their combination and comparison provide valuable insights. In conclusion, this study successfully addresses the challenges of developing a generic, complete framework from impact extraction to network analysis independently of the scale and characteristics of road network types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trajectory prediction is one of the core functions of autonomous driving. Modeling spatial-aware interactions and temporal motion patterns for observed vehicles are critical for accurate trajectory prediction. Most recent works on trajectory prediction utilize recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model temporal patterns and usually need convolutional neural networks (CNNs) additionally to capture spatial interactions. Although Transformer, a multi-head attention-based network, has shown its notable ability in many sequence-modeling tasks (e.g., machine translation in natural language processing), it has not been explored much in trajectory prediction. This paper presents a Spatial Interaction-aware Transformer-based model, which uses the multi-head self-attention mechanism to capture both interactions of neighbor vehicles and temporal dependencies of trajectories. This model applies a GRU-based encoder-decoder module to make the prediction. Besides, different from methods considering the spatial interactions only among observed trajectories in both encoding and decoding stages, our model will also consider the potential spatial interactions between future trajectories in decoding. The proposed model was evaluated on the NGSIM dataset. Compared with other baselines, our model exhibited better prediction precision, especially for long-term prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban parks have important impacts on urban ecosystems and in disaster prevention. They also have diverse social functions that are important to the living conditions and spatial structures of cities. Identifying and classifying the different types of urban parks are important for analyzing the sustainable development and the greening progress in cities. Existing studies have predominantly focused on the data extraction of urban green spaces as a whole, while there have been relatively few studies that have considered different categories of urban parks and their impact, which makes it difficult to characterize or predict the spatial distribution and structures of urban parks and limits further refinement of urban research. At present, the classification of urban parks relies on the physical features observed in remote sensing images, but these methods are limited when mapping the diverse functions and attributes of urban parks. Crowd-sourced geographic data may more accurately express the social functions of points of interest (POIs) in cities, and, therefore, employing open data sources may assist in data extraction and the classification of different types of urban parks. This paper proposed a multi-source data fusion approach for urban park classification including POI and urban functional zone (UFZ) data. First, the POI data were automatically reclassified using improved natural language processing (NLP) (i.e., text similarity measurements and topic modeling) to establish the links between urban park green-space types and POIs. The reclassified POI data as well as the UFZ data were then subjected to scene-based data fusion, and various types of urban parks were extracted using data attribute analysis and social attribute recognition for urban park mapping. Experimental analysis was conducted across Beijing and Hangzhou to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, which had an overall classification accuracy of 82.8%. Finally, the urban park types of the two cities were compared and analyzed to obtain the characteristics of urban park types and structures in the two cities, which have different climates and urban structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Address parsing is a crucial task in natural language processing, particularly for Chinese addresses. The complex structure and semantic features of Chinese addresses present challenges due to their inherent ambiguity. Additionally, different task scenarios require varying levels of granularity in address components, further complicating the parsing process. To address these challenges and adapt to low-resource environments, we propose CapICL, a novel Chinese address parsing model based on the In-Context Learning (ICL) framework. CapICL leverages a sequence generator, regular expression matching, BERT semantic similarity computation, and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) modeling to enhance parsing accuracy by incorporating contextual information. We construct the sequence generator using a small annotated dataset, capturing distribution patterns and boundary features of address types to model address structure and semantics, which mitigates interference from unnecessary variations. We introduce the REB–KNN algorithm, which selects similar samples for ICL-based parsing using regular expression matching and BERT semantic similarity computation. The selected samples, raw text, and explanatory text are combined to form prompts and inputted into the GPT model for prediction and address parsing. Experimental results demonstrate significant achievements of CapICL in low-resource environments, reducing dependency on annotated data and computational resources. Our model's effectiveness, adaptability, and broad application potential are validated, showcasing its positive impact in natural language processing and geographical information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earthquake disaster assessment is one of the most critical aspects in reducing earthquake disaster losses. However, traditional seismic intensity assessment methods are not effective in disaster-stricken areas with insufficient observation data. Social media data contain a large amount of disaster information with the advantages of timeliness and multiple temporal-spatial scales, opening up a new channel for seismic intensity assessment. Based on the earthquake disaster information on the microblog platform obtained by the network technique, a multi-model coupled seismic intensity assessment method is proposed, which is based on the BERT-TextCNN model, constrained by the seismaesthesia intensity attenuation model, and supplemented by the method of ellipse-fitting inverse distance interpolation. Taking four earthquakes in Sichuan Province as examples, the earthquake intensity was evaluated in the affected areas from the perspective of seismaesthesia. The results show that (1) the microblog data contain a large amount of earthquake information, which can help identify the approximate scope of the disaster area; (2) the influences of the subjectivity and uneven spatial distribution of microblog data on the seismic intensity assessment can be reduced by using the seismaesthesia intensity attenuation model and the method of ellipse-fitting inverse distance interpolation; and (3) the accuracy of seismic intensity assessment based on the coupled model is 70.81%. Thus, the model has higher accuracy and universality. It can be used to assess seismic intensity in multiple regions and assist in the formulation of earthquake relief plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toponym recognition, or the challenge of detecting place names that have a similar referent, is involved in a number of activities connected to geographical information retrieval and geographical information sciences. This research focuses on recognizing Chinese toponyms from social media communications. While broad named entity recognition methods are frequently used to locate places, their accuracy is hampered by the many linguistic abnormalities seen in social media posts, such as informal sentence constructions, name abbreviations, and misspellings. In this study, we describe a Chinese toponym identification model based on a hybrid neural network that was created with these linguistic inconsistencies in mind. Our method adds a number of improvements to a standard bidirectional recurrent neural network model to help with location detection in social media messages. We demonstrate the results of a wide-ranging evaluation of the performance of different supervised machine learning methods, which have the natural advantage of avoiding human design features. A set of controlled experiments with four test datasets (one constructed and three public datasets) demonstrates the performance of supervised machine learning that can achieve good results on the task, significantly outperforming seven baseline models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of mobile devices with GPS capabilities, along with the worldwide adoption of social media, have created a rich source of text data combined with spatio-temporal information. Text data collected from location-based social networks can be used to gain space–time insights into human behavior and provide a view of time and space from the social media lens. From a data modeling perspective, text, time, and space have different scales and representation approaches; hence, it is not trivial to jointly represent them in a unified model. Existing approaches do not capture the sequential structure present in texts or the patterns that drive how text is generated considering the spatio-temporal context at different levels of granularity. In this work, we present a neural language model architecture that allows us to represent time and space as context for text generation at different granularities. We define the task of modeling text, timestamps, and geo-coordinates as a spatio-temporal conditioned language model task. This task definition allows us to employ the same evaluation methodology used in language modeling, which is a traditional natural language processing task that considers the sequential structure of texts. We conduct experiments over two datasets collected from location-based social networks, Twitter and Foursquare. Our experimental results show that each dataset has particular patterns for language generation under spatio-temporal conditions at different granularities. In addition, we present qualitative analyses to show how the proposed model can be used to characterize urban places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of pedestrians' motion is important to real-world applications in public scenes. Due to the complex temporal and spatial factors, trajectory prediction is a challenging task. With the development of attention mechanism recently, transformer network has been successfully applied in natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. We propose an end-to-end transformer network embedded with random deviation queries for pedestrian trajectory forecasting. The self-correcting scheme can enhance the robustness of the network. Moreover, we present a co-training strategy to improve the training effect. The whole scheme is trained collaboratively by the original loss and classification loss. Therefore, we also achieve more accurate prediction results. Experimental results on several datasets indicate the validity and robustness of the network. We achieve the best performance in individual forecasting and comparable results in social forecasting. Encouragingly, our approach achieves a new state of the art on the Hotel and Zara2 datasets compared with the social-based and individual-based approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Point of interest (POI) data serves as a valuable source of semantic information for places of interest and has many geospatial applications in real estate, transportation, and urban planning. With the availability of different data sources, POI conflation serves as a valuable technique for enriching data quality and coverage by merging the POI data from multiple sources. This study proposes a novel end-to-end POI conflation framework consisting of six steps, starting with data procurement, schema standardisation, taxonomy mapping, POI matching, POI unification, and data verification. The feasibility of the proposed framework was demonstrated in a case study conducted in the eastern region of Singapore, where the POI data from five data sources was conflated to form a unified POI dataset. Based on the evaluation conducted, the resulting unified dataset was found to be more comprehensive and complete than any of the five POI data sources alone. Furthermore, the proposed approach for identifying POI matches between different data sources outperformed all baseline approaches with a matching accuracy of 97.6% with an average run time below 3 min when matching over 12,000 POIs to result in 8699 unique POIs, thereby demonstrating the framework's scalability for large scale implementation in dense urban contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Travel blogs are a significant source for modeling human travelling behavior and characterizing tourist destinations owing to the presence of rich geospatial and thematic content. However, the bulk of unstructured text requires extensive processing for an efficient transformation of data to knowledge. Existing works have studied tourist places, but results lack a coherent outline and visualization of the semantic knowledge associated with tourist attractions. Hence, this work proposes place semantics extraction based on a fusion of content analysis and natural language processing (NLP) techniques. A weighted-sum equation model is then employed to construct a points of interest graph (POI graph) that integrates extracted semantics with conventional frequency-based weighting of tourist spots and routes. The framework offers determination and visualization of massive blog text in a comprehensible manner to facilitate individuals in travel decision-making as well as tourism managers to devise effective destination planning and management strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]