GEDMWA: geospatial exploratory data mining web agent

ABSTRACT

An abundance of geospatial information is flourishing on the Internet but mining and disseminating these data is a daunting task. With anything published on the web available to the public it has become a grand repository of volunteered geographic information (VGI). Internet users often provide location information for videos, pictures, travel destinations, or other events. All of these data can be gathered by a web crawling geospatial agent that later performs geospatial data mining. The discovered geoinformation can be stored, analyzed, queried, and visualized as the agent creates a data repository of what it discovered. This paper presents the design and prototypical implementation of the GEDMWA (Geospatial Exploratory Data Mining Web Agent). It reads webpage data and follows links to acquire knowledge in order to add value to geoinformation usable in a GIS. The agent creates a database of webpage text, mines it for location information, and then converts it to proper geospatial data format. The data is quickly visualized and analyzed after GEDMWA converts it into proper GIS and virtual globe formats. This provides diverse user communities a tool that utilizes a variety of distributed sources to discover additional knowledge about their fields of interest.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Selection process; Search process

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Management, Measurement

Keywords:
VGI, geographic data mining, geospatial agent