Article history: Received 21 September 2016 Received in revised form 28 January 2017 Accepted 13 March 2017 Available online xxxx Gazetteers are important tools used in a wide variety of workflows that depend on linking natural language text to geographical space. The spatial properties of these data sources, such as coverage, balance, and completeness, affect the performance of common tasks su...

BACKGROUND In the light of the universal healthcare coverage that was achieved in Thailand in 2002, policy makers have raised concerns about whether there is still unmet need within the population. Our objectives were to assess the annual prevalence, characteristics and reasons for unmet healthcare need in the Thai population in 2010 and to compare our findings with relevant international liter...

Geographical information systems are ideal candidates for the application of parallel programming techniques, mainly because they usually handle large data sets. To help us deal with complex calculations over such data sets, we investigated the performance constraints of a classic master-worker parallel paradigm over a message-passing communication model. To this end, we present a new approach ...

BACKGROUND Detecting outbreaks is a crucial task for public health officials, yet gaps remain in the systematic evaluation of outbreak detection protocols. The authors' objectives were to design, implement, and test a flexible methodology for generating detailed synthetic surveillance data that provides realistic geographical and temporal clustering of cases and use to evaluate outbreak detecti...

Most messages posted in Twitter usually discuss an ongoing event, triggering a series of tweets that together may constitute a trending topic (e.g., #election2012, #jesuischarlie, #oscars2016). Sometimes, such a topic may be trending only locally, assuming that related posts have a geographical reference, either directly geotagging them with exact coordinates or indirectly by mentioning a well-...

Extended Abstract. It is a traditional way in biological, sociological, agricultural and geological studies to partition a geographical area into quadrats and then take a sample of them by a particular sampling design. We study the relevant characteristic of quadrats to estimate a parameter of the population. We suppose that the variable of interest has a positive spatial autocorrelation. Sampl...

This paper discusses using Geographical Information Systems to predict broadband wireless coverage and channel characteristics in the bands between 2.4 and 30 GHz. It presents system layout software that integrates demographic, marketing, and land-use data with digital elevation models (DEM) and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) measurements and compares predicted coverage with measurements a...

Is the use of an online course delivery format, when compared with the more traditional face-to-face format, good or bad in the context of university education? Those who subscribe to the no-significant-difference perspective argue that online delivery is good, because it allows students with time and geographic distance constraints to obtain the education that they need, with no significant ne...

Point of Departure " First Law of Geography " : " Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. " — Waldo Tobler, 1970 Fundamental Dialectological Postulate: " Geographically proximate varieties tend to be more similar than distant ones. " — Nerbonne & Kleiweg, 2007 Tested on different types of data (surveys, corpora) Several kinds of geograph...