Spatial grounding with vague place models

Abstract

Vagueness arises as a problem in the context of grounding named entities, a central task in geographic information retrieval (GIR) which consists in establishing the entities' "denotation with respect to the world or a model" [8]. We use the term spatial grounding in a slightly more general sense to refer to the association of any type of spatial descriptor with a place model. In the simplest case, the descriptor consists of a toponym and the place model is provided by a (vague) geographic region. More complex descriptors make use of prepositional phrases or even a text span comprising many sentences, e.g. a travel blog entry. However, descriptors are in no way limited to natural language expressions. A frequently used descriptor in mobile GIR is the geographic position of the user as part of the specification of an information need. Furthermore, spatial activities such as taking photographs can also act as descriptors for places models ("tell me more about the focused object"). Different place models for representing the vagueness of regions have been proposed including supervaluation semantics and qualitatively augmented fuzzy footprints [12]. In this paper we concentrate on approaches to grounding that exploit diverse information sources, for instance, topographic data or the spatial behavior of a user community, to determine place models which are sometimes more complex than point sets.

References

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Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Modeling and simulation

    • Model development and analysis

• Human-centered computing

  • Visualization

    • Visualization application domains

      • Geographic visualization

• Information systems

  • Information systems applications

    • Spatial-temporal systems