Context-Sensitive Qualitative Spatial Reasoning for Interpreting Vague Place Descriptions

自愿提供的地理信息可被视为涵盖了广泛的信息来源，从有目的地收集的地理参考数据到隐含的地理参考，例如对地理实体的文字描述，如“雷格尼茨河双臂之间的一个公园，靠近Bug村”。使计算机系统受益于后一类隐含信息特别重要，因为基于文本的通信是一种非常自然的信息交换形式，特别是考虑到社交媒体平台、推文或维基百科。因此，有各种各样的信息片段可以服务于多种应用，它还可以作为一种工具，以获得对空间环境的利用和概念的社会方面的新见解。在利用文本中隐含的地理信息之前，必须首先使地理信息内容相对于现有的地理知识进行显式和解释--这集中在空间知识的表示、推理和查询技术上。本项目将研究定性空间推理(QSR)技术来获取人类生成的模糊地点描述中的上下文敏感的模糊空间信息，并将开发允许使用这种描述来查询地理数据库的算法。本项目的目的是开发(1)一个计算模型来表示符号语句中的定性的上下文相关的模糊空间关系，特别是考虑模糊关系语义的相互一致的解释，(2)能够集成几个这样的语句的推理算法，以及(3)允许将模糊描述的地点与地理数据库进行匹配的查询算法。

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can be regarded to encompass a broad spectrum of sources for information, ranging from purposefully collected geo-referenced data to implicit geographical references, for example textual descriptions of geographic entities like "a park between the arms of the Regnitz river, near the village Bug". Enabling computer systems to benefit from the latter category of implicit information is particularly relevant since text-based communication is a very natural form of information exchange, in particular considering social media platforms, Tweets, or the Wikipedia encyclopedia. As a consequence, there exists manifoldly pieces of information that can serve several applications, and it may also serve as a tool to gain new insights into social aspects of utilization and conception of spatial environments. Before pieces of implicit geographic information contained in text can be exploited, geographic information content has first to be made explicit and interpreted with respect to existing geographical knowledge -- this puts a focus on spatial knowledge representation, reasoning, and querying techniques.This project will investigate qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR) techniques to capture context-sensitive vague spatial information in human-generated vague place descriptions and will develop algorithms that allow geographic databases to be queried using such descriptions.The aim of this project is to develop (1) a computational model to represent qualitative context-dependent vague spatial relations in symbolic statements that particularly considers mutually consistent interpretation of vague relation semantics, (2) reasoning algorithms capable of integrating several such statements, and (3) query algorithms that allow matching vaguely described places against a geographic database.