Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1311.5204

On Quantifying Qualitative Geospatial Data: A Probabilistic Approach

Georgios Skoumas·Dieter Pfoser·Anastasios Kyrillidis
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Living in the era of data deluge, we have witnessed a web content explosion, largely due to the massive availability of User-Generated Content (UGC). In this work, we specifically consider the problem of geospatial information extraction and representation, where one can exploit diverse sources of information (such as image and audio data, text data, etc), going beyond traditional volunteered geographic information. Our ambition is to include available narrative information in an effort to better explain geospatial relationships: with spatial reasoning being a basic form of human cognition, narratives expressing such experiences typically contain qualitative spatial data, i.e., spatial objects and spatial relationships. To this end, we formulate a quantitative approach for the representation of qualitative spatial relations extracted from UGC in the form of texts. The proposed method quantifies such relations based on multiple text observations. Such observations provide distance and orientation features which are utilized by a greedy Expectation Maximization-based (EM) algorithm to infer a probability distribution over predefined spatial relationships; the latter represent the quantified relationships under user-defined probabilistic assumptions. We evaluate the applicability and quality of the proposed approach using real UGC data originating from an actual travel blog text corpus. To verify the quality of the result, we generate grid-based maps visualizing the spatial extent of the various relations.

Explore related subjects

cs.DB

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Georgios Skoumas, Dieter Pfoser, Anastasios Kyrillidis. 2013-11-18. On Quantifying Qualitative Geospatial Data: A Probabilistic Approach. https://doi.org/10.1145/2534732.2534742

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

VectorMaton: Efficient Vector Search with Pattern Constraints via an Enhanced Suffix Automaton

Approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) has become a cornerstone in modern vector database systems. Given a query vector, ANNS retrieves the closest vectors from a set of base vectors. In real-world applications, vectors are often accompanied by additional information, such as sequences or structured attributes, motivating the need for fine-grained vector search with constraints on this auxiliary data. Existing methods support attribute-based filtering or range-based filtering on categorical and numerical attributes, but they do not support pattern predicates over sequence attributes. In relational databases, predicates such as LIKE and CONTAINS are fundamental operators for filtering records based on substring patterns. As vector databases increasingly adopt SQL-style query interfaces, enabling pattern predicates over sequence attributes (e.g., texts and biological sequences) alongside vector similarity search becomes essential. In this paper, we formulate a novel problem: given a set of vectors each associated with a sequence, retrieve the nearest vectors whose sequences contain a given query pattern. To address this challenge, we propose VectorMaton, an automaton-based index that integrates pattern filtering with efficient vector search, while maintaining an index size comparable to the dataset size. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that VectorMaton consistently outperforms all baselines, achieving up to 10x higher query throughput at the same accuracy and up to 18x reduction in index size.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

Efficient K-generalizable Learned Search

Learned top-K search improves the accuracy-latency trade-off of graph-based vector search, but existing methods are designed for a fixed K: serving production workloads with varying K values requires preprocessing cost proportional to the number of distinct Ks served - prohibitive in practice. This paper shows that learned search can support arbitrary K with the preprocessing cost of a single top-1 model. The key idea is to reduce top-K learned search to repeated masked top-1 refinement, which works because the distance-reduction trajectory for discovering the next top-1 vector is largely invariant to the number of results already found. We therefore train the model on trajectory features that remain effective under masking. To make repeated refinement robust and efficient, OMEGA counters error accumulation across iterations with rank-wise confidence allocation, and skips unnecessary model invocations with a statistical forecast of recall from partial results. Across nine dataset-scale configurations, OMEGA meets the 0.95 recall target with one K-independent model. Under the lowest-preprocessing configuration of each learned baseline,it reduces mean latency by 7-36% versus DARTH, 3-25% versus MultiK-DARTH, and 8-21% versus LAET on BIGANN, BIGANN-1B, DEEP, and three production workloads. On GIST, Text2Image, and MS MARCO, its latency remains within 9% of DARTH and MultiK-DARTH. On production traces, OMEGA further reduces total serving and preprocessing computation by up to 28%.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

Samyama: A Unified Graph-Vector Database with In-Database Optimization, Agentic Enrichment, and Hardware Acceleration

Modern data architectures fragment across graph databases, vector stores, analytics engines and optimization solvers, forcing ETL between them. We present Samyama, a graph-vector database in Rust that unifies these workloads in one engine: a RocksDB-backed store with MVCC, a vectorized executor, a cost-based planner, a CSR analytics engine, RDF and SPARQL, 22 metaheuristic solvers callable from the query language, HNSW vector indexing, and agentic enrichment that expands a graph via LLMs. It has been run to billion-edge scale: 74.3M nodes and 1.07B edges from four biomedical sources on one machine for $2.50 of spot compute. This version re-measures the system at release v1.8.0 on rented Linux hosts a reader can boot, replacing earlier figures taken on a Mac Mini that nobody could re-run. On a 16-vCPU cloud instance, ingestion reaches 123K-152K nodes/s and PageRank costs 6.7 ms per iteration at ten thousand nodes and 236 ms at a million. The previously reported 8.2x GPU speedup is withdrawn; in its place we measure the CUDA path, which no earlier version measured at all, on a rented NVIDIA A16: parity with the CPU at ten thousand nodes, 1.62x at a hundred thousand and 2.70x at a million, with 1.1-1.35 s of context initialisation on the first call. The earlier Cypher-throughput figure, its claim of near-constant index-driven scaling, and a vector-search figure are withdrawn as unreproducible. openCypher conformance, once estimated at ~90%, is now measured at 99.9% of evaluated TCK scenarios. Against Neo4j 5 and FalkorDB on one host over an identical SF10 extract, 14 of 14 SNB complex reads land within 5x of the best competitor and 7 of 14 are faster.

cs.DB↗