Fuzzying GIS topological functions for GIR needs

Abstract

Natural Language 'schematizes' space; textual geographic information is usually a selection of certain aspects of a referent scene while neglecting others. Thus, an indexing process relying on such information obviously contains some degree of imprecision and uncertainty. The PIV prototype is a GIR system dedicated to geographic evocations tagging, geo-computing, indexing, querying and visualizing in wide corpora of travel books. The aim of this paper is to focus on the PIV spatial relationships management of vagueness for distance, direction and topology relationships. The proposed approach extends GIS operators with fuzzy spatial relationship functions like proximity and cardinal direction.