GeoAI-enhanced Techniques to Support Geographical Knowledge Discovery from Big Geospatial Data

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Description
Big data that contain geo-referenced attributes have significantly reformed the way that I process and analyze geospatial data. Compared with the expected benefits received in the data-rich environment, more data have not always contributed to more accurate analysis. “Big but

Big data that contain geo-referenced attributes have significantly reformed the way that I process and analyze geospatial data. Compared with the expected benefits received in the data-rich environment, more data have not always contributed to more accurate analysis. “Big but valueless” has becoming a critical concern to the community of GIScience and data-driven geography. As a highly-utilized function of GeoAI technique, deep learning models designed for processing geospatial data integrate powerful computing hardware and deep neural networks into various dimensions of geography to effectively discover the representation of data. However, limitations of these deep learning models have also been reported when People may have to spend much time on preparing training data for implementing a deep learning model. The objective of this dissertation research is to promote state-of-the-art deep learning models in discovering the representation, value and hidden knowledge of GIS and remote sensing data, through three research approaches. The first methodological framework aims to unify varied shadow into limited number of patterns, with the convolutional neural network (CNNs)-powered shape classification, multifarious shadow shapes with a limited number of representative shadow patterns for efficient shadow-based building height estimation. The second research focus integrates semantic analysis into a framework of various state-of-the-art CNNs to support human-level understanding of map content. The final research approach of this dissertation focuses on normalizing geospatial domain knowledge to promote the transferability of a CNN’s model to land-use/land-cover classification. This research reports a method designed to discover detailed land-use/land-cover types that might be challenging for a state-of-the-art CNN’s model that previously performed well on land-cover classification only.
Date Created
2019
Agent

An Integrated Software Framework to Support Semantic Modeling and Reasoning of Spatiotemporal Change of Geographical Objects: A Use Case of Land Use and Land Cover Change Study

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Description

Evolving Earth observation and change detection techniques enable the automatic identification of Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) over a large extent from massive amounts of remote sensing data. It at the same time poses a major challenge in

Evolving Earth observation and change detection techniques enable the automatic identification of Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) over a large extent from massive amounts of remote sensing data. It at the same time poses a major challenge in effective organization, representation and modeling of such information. This study proposes and implements an integrated computational framework to support the modeling, semantic and spatial reasoning of change information with regard to space, time and topology. We first proposed a conceptual model to formally represent the spatiotemporal variation of change data, which is essential knowledge to support various environmental and social studies, such as deforestation and urbanization studies. Then, a spatial ontology was created to encode these semantic spatiotemporal data in a machine-understandable format. Based on the knowledge defined in the ontology and related reasoning rules, a semantic platform was developed to support the semantic query and change trajectory reasoning of areas with LULCC. This semantic platform is innovative, as it integrates semantic and spatial reasoning into a coherent computational and operational software framework to support automated semantic analysis of time series data that can go beyond LULC datasets. In addition, this system scales well as the amount of data increases, validated by a number of experimental results. This work contributes significantly to both the geospatial Semantic Web and GIScience communities in terms of the establishment of the (web-based) semantic platform for collaborative question answering and decision-making.

Date Created
2016-09-30
Agent