Criteria of geographic relevance: an experimental study

Abstract

The relevance of geographic information has become an emerging problem in geographic information science due to an enormous increase in volumes of data at high spatial, temporal, and semantic resolution, because of ever faster rates of new data capturing. At the same time, it is not clear whether the concept of relevance developed in information science and implemented for document-based information retrieval can be directly applied to this new, highly dynamic setting. In this study, we analyze the criteria users apply when judging the relevance of geographic entities in a given mobile usage context. Two different experiments have been set up in order to gather users' opinions on a set of possible criteria, and their relevance judgements in a given scenario. The importance ascribed to the criteria in both experiments clearly implies that a new concept of relevance is required when dealing with geographic entities instead of digital documents. This new concept of 'Geographic Relevance' is highly dependent on personal mobility and user's activity, whose understanding may in turn be refined by the assimilation of 'Geographic Relevance' itself.

An Exploratory Study Investigating Gender Effects on Using 3D Maps for Spatial Orientation in Wayfinding

“…Ideally, relevance would be measured quantitatively. However, quantifying relevance in a geographic context is complicated [37,38] and considered outside the scope of this paper. We employed a practical approach: to use landmark salience to approximate task relevance.…”

Geographic dimensions of relevance

“…The four models are characterized by increasing complexity, richness, and expressive power: the geometrical one includes metrics, the topological one adds relations, the structural adds configuration, and the semantic adds meaning. To show how these more sophisticated models of space can be used, one might consider that a structural conception of space is necessary to implement criteria of geographic relevance, such as cluster and colocation (De Sabbata and Reichenbacher, 2012). However, only a semantic conception of space would enable a comprehensive development of the activity, preferences, social, and context component, as it accounts for the functions, properties, and qualities of a place.…”

“…A key difference between situational relevance as defined by Wilson (1973) and GRRaper as defined by Raper (2007) is that the former defines the relevance of a document referring to a physical entity, whereas the latter defines the relevance of a physical entity. A difference of the same kind can be found when comparing relevance as defined in GIR (Palacio et al, 2010) and MIR (Mountain and Macfarlane, 2007) (which are pragmatic derivations of situational relevance) and GRR&D as defined by Reichenbacher and De Sabbata (Reichenbacher and De Sabbata, 2011;De Sabbata and Reichenbacher, 2012). A surrogate taken into account in IR, GIR, and MIR provides information about a document, such as an entry in database of crawled Web pages and a set of entries in an inverted index.…”

“…As mobile scenarios become more and more common, it is important to analyse how different relevance concepts deal with a user's mobility (Mountain, 2005;Mountain and MacFarlane, 2007;Raper, 2007;Raper et al, 2007), and represent the world surrounding a user (Reichenbacher, 2004;Reichenbacher and De Sabbata, 2011;De Sabbata and Reichenbacher, 2012). Relevance has always been recognized as a crucial notion for IR, and there is a vast body of literature devoted to it.…”

A Point-Set-Based Footprint Model and Spatial Ranking Method for Geographic Information Retrieval

“…De Andrade [18] further integrates the overlap degree of MBRs with the spatial relevance, which is defined by the overlapping frequencies of MBRs, to calculate the spatial rankings. De Sabbata and Reichenbacher [19,20] present five fine-grained criteria (including topicality, spatiotemporal proximity, directionality, cluster, and colocation) for calculating spatial relevance Some efforts have been made to overcome the above issues. Improved geometric footprint models, including multiple polygons [14,15] and MBR set [16,17], are presented as one kind of solutions.…”