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]

Good characterization of traffic interactions among urban roads can facilitate traffic-related applications, such as traffic control and short-term forecasting. Most studies measure the traffic interaction between two roads by their topological distance or the correlation between their traffic variables. However, the distance-based methods neglect the spatial heterogeneity of roads' traffic interactions, while the correlation-based methods cannot capture the non-linear dependency between two roads' traffic variables. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Road2Vec to quantify the implicit traffic interactions among roads based on large-scale taxi operating route data using a Word2Vec model from the natural language processing (NLP) field. First, the analogy between transportation elements (i.e., road segment, travel route) and NLP terms (i.e., word, document) is established. Second, the real-valued vectors for road segments are trained from massive travel routes using the Word2Vec model. Third, the traffic interaction between any pair of roads is measured by the cosine similarity of their vectors. A case study on short-term traffic forecasting is conducted with artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms to validate the advantages of the presented method. The results show that the forecasting achieves a higher accuracy with the support of the Road2Vec method than with the topological distance and traffic correlation based methods. We argue that the Road2Vec method can be effectively utilized for quantifying complex traffic interactions among roads and capturing underlying heterogeneous and non-linear properties. [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]

In recent years, with the growing accessibility of abundant contextual emotion information, which is benefited by the numerous georeferenced user-generated content and the maturity of artificial intelligence (AI)-based emotional computing technics, the emotion layer of human–environment relationship is proposed for enriching traditional methods of various related disciplines such as urban planning. This paper proposes the geographic information system (GIS)-based emotional computing concept, which is a novel framework for applying GIS methods to collective human emotion. The methodology presented in this paper consists of three key steps: (1) collecting georeferenced data containing emotion and environment information such as social media and official sites, (2) detecting emotions using AI-based emotional computing technics such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), and (3) visualizing and analyzing the spatiotemporal patterns with GIS tools. This methodology is a great synergy of multidisciplinary cutting-edge techniques, such as GIScience, sociology, and computer science. Moreover, it can effectively and deeply explore the connection between people and their surroundings with the help of GIS methods. Generally, the framework provides a standard workflow to calculate and analyze the new information layer for researchers, in which a measured human-centric perspective onto the environment is possible. [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]

The abnormal change in the global climate has increased the chance of urban rainstorm disasters, which greatly threatens people's daily lives, especially public travel. Timely and effective disaster data sources and analysis methods are essential for disaster reduction. With the popularity of mobile devices and the development of network facilities, social media has attracted widespread attention as a new source of disaster data. The characteristics of rich disaster information, near real-time transmission channels, and low-cost data production have been favored by many researchers. These researchers have used different methods to study disaster reduction based on the different dimensions of information contained in social media, including time, location and content. However, current research is not sufficient and rarely combines specific road condition information with public emotional information to detect traffic impact areas and assess the spatiotemporal influence of these areas. Thus, in this paper, we used various methods, including natural language processing and deep learning, to extract the fine-grained road condition information and public emotional information contained in social media text to comprehensively detect and analyze traffic impact areas during a rainstorm disaster. Furthermore, we proposed a model to evaluate the spatiotemporal influence of these detected traffic impact areas. The heavy rainstorm event in Beijing, China, in 2018 was selected as a case study to verify the validity of the disaster reduction method proposed in this paper. [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]

The rapid growth of positioning technology allows tracking motion between places, making trajectory recordings an important source of information about place connectivity, as they map the routes that people commonly perform. In this paper, we utilize users' motion traces to construct a behavioral representation of places based on how people move between them, ignoring geographical coordinates and spatial proximity. Inspired by natural language processing techniques, we generate and explore vector representations of locations, traces and visitors, obtained through an unsupervised machine learning approach, which we generically named motion-to-vector (Mot2vec), trained on large-scale mobility data. The algorithm consists of two steps, the trajectory pre-processing and the Word2vec-based model building. First, mobility traces are converted into sequences of locations that unfold in fixed time steps; then, a Skip-gram Word2vec model is used to construct the location embeddings. Trace and visitor embeddings are finally created combining the location vectors belonging to each trace or visitor. Mot2vec provides a meaningful representation of locations, based on the motion behavior of users, defining a direct way of comparing locations' connectivity and providing analogous similarity distributions for places of the same type. In addition, it defines a metric of similarity for traces and visitors beyond their spatial proximity and identifies common motion behaviors between different categories of people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowdsourced data (CSD) generated by citizens is becoming more popular as its potential utilization in many applications increases due to its currency and availability. However, the quality of CSD, including its relevance, is often questioned as the data is not generated by professionals nor follows standard data-collection procedures. The quality of CSD can be assessed according to a range of characteristics including its relevance. In this paper, information relevance has been explored through using geographic information retrieval (GIR) techniques to identify the most highly relevant information from a set of crowdsourced data. This research tested a relevance assessment approach for CSD by adapting relevance assessment techniques available in the GIR domain. Thematic and geographic relevance were assessed by analyzing the frequency of selected terms which appeared in CSD reports using natural language processing techniques. The study analyzed crowdsourced reports from the 2011 Australian flood’s Crowdmap to examine a proof of concept on relevance assessment using a subset of this dataset based on a defined set of queries. The results determined that the thematic and geographic specificities of the queries were 0.44 and 0.67, respectively, which indicated the queries used were more geographically specific than thematically specific. The Spearman’s rho value of 0.62 indicated that the final ranked relevance lists showed reasonable agreement with a manually classified list and confirmed the potential of the approach for CSD relevance assessment. In particular, this research has contributed to the field of CSD relevance assessment through an integrated thematic and geographic relevance ranking process by using a user-query specificity approach to improve the final ranking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]