Modeling and querying uncertain spatial information for situational awareness applications

ABSTRACT

Situational awareness (SA) applications monitor the real world and the entities therein to support tasks such as rapid decision-making, reasoning, and analysis. Raw input about unfolding events may arrive from variety of sources in the form of sensor data, video streams, human observations, and so on, from which events of interest are extracted. Location is one of the most important attributes of events, useful for a variety of SA tasks. In this paper, we propose an approach to model and represent (potentially uncertain) event locations described by human reporters in the form of free text. We analyze several types of spatial queries of interest in SA applications. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.8 Database applications
          Subjects: Spatial databases and GIS

General Terms:
Algorithms, Performance

Keywords:
modelling, probability, retrieval, uncertain