Event Details

Talk by Dr Hanan Samet from the University of Maryland, titled: 'Reading News with Maps by Exploiting Spatial Synonyms'

News Stand is an example application of a general framework to enable people to search for information using a map query interface, where the information results from monitoring the output of over 10,000 RSS news sources and is available for retrieval within minutes of publication. The advantage of doing so is that a map, coupled with an ability to vary the zoom level at which it is viewed, provides an inherent granularity to the search process that facilitates an approximate search. This distinguishes it from today's prevalent keyword-based conventional search methods that provide a very limited facility for approximate searches and which are realized primarily by permitting a match via use of a subset of the keywords. However, it is often the case that users do not have a firm grasp of which keyword to use, and thus would welcome the search to also take synonyms into account.

For queries to spatially-referenced data, the map query interface is a step in this direction as the act of pointing at a location(e.g., by the appropriate positioning of a pointing device) and making the interpretation of the precision of this positioning specification dependent on the zoom level is equivalent to permitting the use of spatial synonyms (i.e.,letting spatial proximity play a role rather than only seeking an exact match of a query string). Of course, this is all predicated on the use of a textual specification of locations rather than a geometric one, which means that one must deal with the potential for ambiguity.

Dr Hanan Samet Bio:

Hanan Samet (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/)is a Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park and is a member of the Institute for Computer Studies. He is also a member of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the Center for Automation Research where he leads a number of research projects on the use of hierarchical data structures for database applications, geographic information systems (GIS), computer graphics, computer vision, image processing, games, robotics, search, and textual representations of location as in the News Stand (http://newsstand.umiacs.umd.edu)and Twitter Stand (http://twitterstand.umiacs.umd.edu)which enable accessing a database of news articles and tweets using a map query interface.