Locus: an Urban Spatial Location Tool

1
Locus an Urban Spatial Location Tool

• Ligiane Souza, Tiago Delboni, Karla Borges,
  Clodoveu Davis Jr. e Alberto Laender
• UFMG Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Prodabel Empresa de Informática e Informação do
  Município de Belo Horizonte

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Outline

• Introduction
• Objective
• Goals
• Place Ontology
• Conceptual Modeling
• Current Stage
• Conclusion

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Introduction

• Indirect Spatial References used when the
  location is not explicitly given, using spatial
  coordinates
• Place names
• Addresses
• Postal codes
• Telephone numbers
• There is the need to geographically locate the
  reference, i.e., to obtain direct references or
  coordinates
• Used also to understand how people refer to
  spatial places and events, in order to be able to
  determine the geographic context embedded in the
  communication

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Objective

• To implement a location tool for urban places,
  admitting as input
• (postal) addresses
• references to places (official, popular, or
  previous names, postal codes, telephone numbers
  and others)

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Goals

• To create a gazetteer, based on an ontology of
  places
• To develop efficient and intelligent methods for
  searching and navigating using the gazetteer
• To make results available for usage through the
  Web

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Ontology of Places (1)

• This work is based on the definition of an
  ontology of places

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Ontology of Places (2)
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Conceptual Modeling using OMT-G (1)

• From the ontology, a conceptual schema was
  created for the gazetteer

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OMT-G Conceptual Modeling (2)
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OMT-G Conceptual Modeling (3)
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System Architecture
12
Search
Point of interest
Spatial relation expression
Point of reference
13
Search
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Search
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Result
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Result with spatial relation
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Implementation

• Web interface developed using JSP
• PostGIS DBMS
• MapServer

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Current stage

• Available data
• Political and administrative divisions of Brazil
  down to the municipal level
• Postal codes of all major cities down to the
  individual thoroughfares
• Telephone area codes down to the prefix level
• Poits of reference with exclusive postal code
• Individual addresses and reference points of the
  city of Belo Horizonte
• The current development stage is focused on the
  name matching routines

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Conclusions

• LOCUS will allow the location and visualization
  of places of interest
• Through the ontology it is possible to implement
  an intuitive mechanism for user navigation
• The tool has the potential to be employed in any
  application in which the location of events and
  objects through indirect referencing is
  necessary, such as
• Public health records
• Public safety
• Education
• Urban planning
• Identification of the geographic contect from the
  text in Web pages