New paper “Juxtaposing thematic regions derived from spatial and platial user-generated content” has been accepted as a full paper in the COSIT 2017 proceedings. Link
Selected Publications
Wāhi, a discrete global grid gazetteer built using linked open data
This paper introduces Wāhi, the first gazetteer to map entities from the GeoNames database to multiple discrete global grid systems. A gazetteer service is presented that exposes the grid system and the associated gazetteer data as Linked Data. A set of use cases for the discrete global grid gazetteer is discussed.
International Journal of Digital Earth
Exploratory Chronotopic Data Analysis
The intrinsic connection between place, space, and time in narrative texts is the subject of chronotopic literary analysis. We take the notion of the chronotope and apply it to exploratory analysis of unstructured big data. Exploratory chronotopic data analysis provides a data-driven perspective on how place, space, and time are connected in large, crowdsourced text collections. In this study, we processed the English Wikipedia text to find all co-occurrences of named places and dates and discovered that times are linked to places in a large majority of cases. We analyzed these millions of connections between places and dates and discovered a number of interesting trends. Because of the scale of the data involved, we suggest that chronotopic data analysis will lead to the development of new data models and methods for geographic information science and related fields, such as digital humanities.
In GIScience 2016
Frankenplace: interactive thematic mapping for ad hoc exploratory search
In this paper we describe the architecture of an interactive thematic map search engine, Frankenplace, designed to facilitate document exploration at the intersection of theme and place. The map interface enables a user to zoom the geographic context of their query in and out, and quickly explore through thousands of search results in a meaningful way. And by combining topic models with geographically contextualized search results, users can discover related topics based on geographic context. Frankenplace utilizes a novel indexing method called geoboost for boosting terms associated with cells on a discrete global grid. The resulting index factors in the geographic scale of the place or feature mentioned in related text, the relative textual scope of the place reference, and the overall importance of the containing document in the document network. The system is currently indexed with over 5 million documents from the web, including the English Wikipedia and online travel blog entries. We demonstrate that Frankenplace can support four distinct types of exploratory search tasks while being adaptive to scale and location of interest.
In WWW 2015
Re-envisioning data description using Peirce's Pragmatics
We show in this paper that a reconceptualization of geographical information in terms of Peirce's Pragmatics (specifically firstness, secondness and thirdness) can provide the necessary modeling power for representing situations of data use and data production, and for recognizing that we do not all see and understand in the same way. This in turn provides additional dimensions by which intentions and purpose can be brought into the representation of geographical data. Formally, we propose a generative graphical model for geographic data production through pragmatic description spaces and a pragmatic data description relation. As a simple demonstration of viability, we also show how this model can be used to learn knowledge about the community, the tasks undertaken, and even domain categories, from text descriptions of data and use-cases that are currently available. We show that the knowledge we gain can be used to improve our ability to find fit-for-purpose data.
In GIScience 2014
