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Vague Relations in Spatial Databases

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Book cover Natural Language Processing and Information Systems (NLDB 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6177))

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Abstract

While qualitative relations (e.g. RCC8 relations) can readily be derived from spatial databases, a more difficult matter is the representation of vague spatial relations such as ‘near-to’,‘next-to’, ‘between’, etc. After surveying earlier approaches, this paper proposes a method that is tractable, learnable and directly suitable for use in natural language interfaces to spatial databases. The approach is based on definite logic programs with contexts represented as first class objects and supervaluation over a set of threshold parameters. Given an initial hand-built program with open threshold parameters, a polynomial-time algorithm finds a setting of threshold parameters that are consistent with a training corpus of vague descriptions of scenes. The results of this algorithm may then be compiled into view definitions which are accessed in real-time by natural language interfaces employing normal, non-exotic query answering mechanisms.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing Science, UmeåUniversity, SE-901 87, Umeå, Sweden

    Michael J. Minock

Authors
  1. Michael J. Minock
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering, Cardiff University, UK

    Christina J. Hopfe  & Haijiang Li  & 

  2. Informatics Research Institute, University of Salford, M5 4WT, Greater Manchester, UK

    Yacine Rezgui

  3. Centre National des Arts et Métiers,  

    Elisabeth Métais

  4. School of Computer Science, Cardiff University, UK

    Alun Preece

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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Minock, M.J. (2010). Vague Relations in Spatial Databases. In: Hopfe, C.J., Rezgui, Y., Métais, E., Preece, A., Li, H. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6177. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13881-2_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13881-2_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13880-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-13881-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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