Case-Based Reasoning for Eliciting the Evolution of Geospatial Objects

This paper proposes an automated approach for describing how geospatial objects evolve. We consider geospatial objects whose boundaries and properties change in the time, and refer to them as evolving objects. Our approach is to provide a set of rules that describe how objects change, referred to as rule-based evolution. We consider the case where we are given a series of snapshots, each of which contains the status of the objects at a given time. Given this data, we would like to extract the rules that describe how these objects changed. We use the technique of case-based reasoning (CBR) to extract the rules of object evolution, given a few representatives examples. The resulting rules are used to elicit the full history of all changes in these objects. This allows finding out how objects evolved, recovering their history. As an example of our proposed approach, we include a case study of how deforestation evolves in Brazilian Amazonia Tropical Forest.