Reasoning over higher-order qualitative spatial relations via spatially explicit neural networks

Autor(en)
Rui Zhu, Krzysztof Janowicz, Ling Cai, Gengchen Mai
Abstrakt

Qualitative spatial reasoning has been a core research topic in GIScience and AI for decades. It has been adopted in a wide range of applications such as wayfinding, question answering, and robotics. Most developed spatial inference engines use symbolic representation and reasoning, which focuses on small and densely connected data sets, and struggles to deal with noise and vagueness. However, with more sensors becoming available, reasoning over spatial relations on large-scale and noisy geospatial data sets requires more robust alternatives. This paper, therefore, proposes a subsymbolic approach using neural networks to facilitate qualitative spatial reasoning. More specifically, we focus on higher-order spatial relations as those have been largely ignored due to the binary nature of the underlying representations, e.g. knowledge graphs. We specifically explore the use of neural networks to reason over ternary projective relations such as between. We consider multiple types of spatial constraint, including higher-order relatedness and the conceptual neighborhood of ternary projective relations to make the proposed model spatially explicit. We introduce evaluating results demonstrating that the proposed spatially explicit method substantially outperforms the existing baseline by about 20%.

Organisation(en)
Institut für Geographie und Regionalforschung
Externe Organisation(en)
University of Bristol, University of California, Santa Barbara, Stanford University
Journal
International Journal of Geographical Information Science
Band
36
Seiten
2194-2225
Anzahl der Seiten
32
ISSN
1365-8816
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2022.2092115
Publikationsdatum
2022
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
507003 Geoinformatik
Schlagwörter
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
Geography, Planning and Development, Information systems, Library and Information Sciences
Link zum Portal
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/cb31a3e8-f56f-4882-bcdc-a3a157ccd53f