Context-Sensitive Qualitative Spatial Reasoning for Interpreting Vague Place Descriptions

可将虚拟地理信息视为涵盖广泛的信息来源，从有目的地收集的地理参照数据到隐含的地理参照，例如对地理实体的文字描述，如“Regnitz河两臂之间的公园，Bug村附近”。使计算机系统能够受益于后一类隐式信息是特别相关的，因为基于文本的通信是非常自然的信息交换形式，特别是考虑到社交媒体平台、推文或维基百科百科全书。因此，存在着各种各样的信息，可以服务于几个应用程序，它也可以作为一种工具，以获得新的见解的社会方面的利用和空间环境的概念。在利用文本中隐含的地理信息之前，地理信息内容必须首先明确并解释现有的地理知识-这将重点放在空间知识表示，推理，和查询技术。本项目将研究定性空间推理（QSR）技术，以捕获人类中上下文敏感的模糊空间信息，本项目的目标是：（1）建立一个计算模型，用符号语句来表示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.