Mining Geospatial Knowledge on the Social Web

Up-to-date geospatial information can help crisis management community to coordinate its response. In addition to data that is created and curated by experts, there is an abundance of user-generated, user-curated data on Social Web sites such as Flickr, Twitter, and Google Earth. User-generated data and metadata can be used to harvest knowledge, including geospatial knowledge that will help solve real-world problems including information discovery, geospatial information integration and data management. This paper proposes a method for acquiring geospatial knowledge in the form of places and relations between them from the user-generated data and metadata on the Social Web. The key to acquiring geospatial knowledge from social metadata is the ability to accurately represent places. The authors describe a simple, efficient algorithm for finding a non-convex boundary of a region from a sample of points from that region. Used within a procedure that learns part-of relations between places from real-world data extracted from the social photo-sharing site Flickr, the proposed algorithm leads to more precise relations than the earlier method and helps uncover knowledge not contained in expertcurated geospatial knowledge bases. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2788-8.ch007