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As business intelligence is for companies, territorial intelligence is for local authorities. However, it is not the simple exportation of business intelligence concepts and tools, but overall a new discipline characterized by the amalgamation of collective human intelligence and computer intelligence. As a result, geographic knowledge bases, rules and inference engines are not only based on logic but also on topology, geometry and linguistics, and must take multiple actors' points of view into account. The scope of this paper will be to present the concepts necessary to construct such systems, i.e. to pass from intelligence to geographic knowledge engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a new visualization approach for the automatic generation of visual summaries dealing with cartographic visualization methods and modeling of real time data coming from sensors. Indeed the concept of chorems seems an interesting candidate to visualize real time geographic database summaries. Chorems have been defined by Roger Brunet as schematized visual representations of territories. However, the time information is not yet handled in existing chorematic map approaches, that is the issue been discussed in this paper in which geodata are coming regularly from sensors distributed along some territory. Our approach is based on spatial analysis by interpolating the values recorded at the same time, so we have a number of distributed observations on areas of study. To get a better visual overview of the entire sensor geodata at a given time, we use spatial statistics formulas on the fly, and so it is possible to extract important spatiotemporal patterns and detect trends over time as geographic rules. Then, those spatiotemporal patterns are visualized as animated chorems. An example is taken from meteorology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In many applications, the management of geographic knowledge is very important especially not only for urban and environmental planning, but also for any application in territorial intelligence. However there are several practical problems hindering the efficiency, some of them being technical and other being more conceptual. The goal of this paper is to present a tentative conceptual framework for managing practical geographic knowledge taking account of accuracy, rotundity of earth, the mobility of objects, multiple-representation, multi-scale, existence of sliver polygons, differences in classifying real features (ontologies), the many-to-many relationship of place names (gazetteers) and the necessity of interoperability. In other words, this framework must be robust against scaling, generalization and small measurement errors. Therefore, geographic objects must be distinguished into several classes of objects with different properties, namely geodetic objects, administrative objects, manmade objects and natural objects. Regarding spatial relations, in addition to conventional topological and projective relations, other relations including tessellations and ribbon topology relations are presented in order to help model geographic objects by integrating more practical semantics. Any conceptual framework is based on principles which are overall guidelines and rules; moreover, principles allow at making predictions and drawing implications and are finally the basic building blocks of theoretical models. But before identifying the principles, one needs some preliminary considerations named prolegomena. In our case, principles will be essentially rules for transforming geographic knowledge whereas prolegomena will be assertions regarding more the foundations of geographic science. Based on those considerations, 12 principles are given, preceded by 12 prolegomena. For instance, some principles deal with the transformation of spatial relationships based on visual acuity and granularity of interest, with the influence of neighboring information and cross-boundary interoperability. New categories of geographic knowledge types are presented, spatial facts, cluster of areas, flows of persons, goods, etc., topological constraints and co-location rules. To represent knowledge chunks, three styles are presented, based respectively on descriptive logics, XML and visual languages. To conclude this paper, after having defined contexts of interpretation, an example of visual language to manage geographic knowledge is proposed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: At the inception of the Internet, the websites were only textual. Now, with the graphic possibilities, more and more websites integrate visual aspects, essentially to access and to visualize information. The goal of this paper is to examine the use of some visual techniques in city websites. More particularly, we will examine the metaphor of virtual cities, hypermaps and geography-based accesses, news magazines, etc. In the last part of this paper, we will examine the implications of using those metaphors for small screens, and overall for Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). We will essentially argue that as the syntactic transformations, i.e., the syntactic adaptations are one face of the problem, the semantic adaptation, i.e., the transformation or the adaptation of the metaphors, is a very challenging issue. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Editorial. Comments on the applications of real time spatio-temporal databases. Characteristics of the system; Architecture of the fleet management application; Functionality of the database systems.

Abstract: The need to support the activities of decision makers through highly interactive visual environments has motivated the growing interest in the area of GeoVisual Analytics. New interactive visualization tools are being envisaged to deal with large datasets in order to synthesize information and perform complex analytical tasks. Along this line, our research efforts have been focusing on new cartographic approaches which could support daily analysts’ work by producing synthesis and presentation of discovered patterns in a concise and understandable way. As a result, we have proposed the adoption of chorems as an innovative method to visually summarize information from spatial databases and we have implemented an XML-based language, named ChorML, able to both specify chorems characterizing a map and store the information useful to their manipulation. The goal of the present paper is to enhance the role that chorems may play in geographic domains, by exploiting them also for querying and accessing data associated with a phenomenon under investigation. To develop this idea, we first extend the semantics associated with the chorem concept and define a set of operators useful for the rapid analysis of spatio-temporal phenomena. Then, starting from an initial prototype, we present a chorem-based visual environment that integrates traditional interactive visualization and analysis techniques. The environment is specifically conceived so that each visual interaction task has a context-sensitive behavior, which allows users to acquire specific information from the underlying spatial database. Finally, we present an enhanced version of ChorML language, able to support the new analysis functionalities on chorems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In GIS, spatial analysis is based on the use of spatial operations such as testing the spatial relations between features. Often, such tests are invalidated by errors in datasets. It is a very common experience that two bordering regions which should obey the topological relation "meet" fall instead in the "overlap" category. The situation is exacerbated when applying topological operators to regions that come from different datasets, where resolution and error sources are different. Despite the problem being quite common, up to now no standard approach has been defined to deal with spatial relations affected by errors of various origins. Referring to topological relations, we define a model to extend the eight Egenhofer relations between two simple regions: we call them homological relations (H‐relations). We discuss how exact topological relations can be extracted from observed relations and discuss the case of irregular tessellations, where errors have the most impact on vector data. In the proposed case study within the domain of geographic crowdsourced data, we propose algorithms for identifying homological regions and obtaining a corrected tessellation. This methodology can be considered as a step for quality control and the certification of irregular tessellations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple cartographic providers propose services displaying points of interests (POI) on maps. However, the provided POIs are often incomplete and contradictory from one provider to another. Previous works proposed solutions for detecting correspondences between spatial entities that refer to the same geographic object. Although one can visualize the result of the integration of corresponding entities, users do not have any information about the quality of this integration. In this paper, we propose a solution to visualize the uncertainty inherent to a spatial integration algorithm. We present an integration process that identifies three levels of confidence for spatial and terminological integration results. Based on perceptual tests, we select visual variables to portray these three levels of confidence and we choose a visualization strategy. A prototype has been implemented to present the benefits of our proposal in a use-case scenario. This work has been realized within the framework of UNIMAP 1 1 UNIMAP: http://liris.cnrs.fr/unimap (July 2014). project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The need to perform complex analysis and decision making tasks has motivated growing interest in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a means to compare different scenarios and simulate the evolution of a phenomenon. However, data and function complexity may critically affect human interaction and system performances during planning and prevention activities. This is especially true when the scenarios of interest involve continuous fields, besides discrete objects. In the present paper we describe the visual environment Phenomena, where continuous and discrete data may be handled through a uniform approach. We illustrate how users’ activity is supported by a visual framework where they can interact with, manipulate and query heterogeneous data, with a very small training effort. A preliminary experimental study suggests that when users perform complex tasks, a higher usability degree may be achieved compared to the adoption of a textual spatial SQL. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In any information system the reliability of any results of queries, analysis or reasoning, depends on data quality (positional accuracy, consistency and so on). In some cases, answers cannot be obtained due to a lack of information, whereas in other cases answers are wrong or not complete because of inconsistent data. In geographical information systems (GIS), data quality management has to handle the spatial features of objects, which brings specific problems. The goal of this paper is to describe a methodology for spatial consistency improvement of geographical data sets in vector format. It is based on errors survey and classification. Three kinds of errors are identified which lead to three kinds of consistency, namely structural consistency, geometric consistency and topo-semantic consistency. Each of them needs specific checking and correcting processes. All these processes are integrated in a general framework that is presented in this paper. An application of this framework to the Lyon Urban Community GIS (the SUR) is currently conducted; first results are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]