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ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf., Volume 12, Issue 9 (September 2023) – 39 articles

Cover Story (view full-size image): The intelligent integration of earth observation (EO) data, primarily represented in the form of raster data cubes using knowledge graphs (KGs), plays a crucial role in managing geospatial data heterogeneity and enhancing semantics. This paper introduces a framework that conceptually defines a semantic model for raster data cubes, extending GeoSPARQL ontology. This model combines raster data cube semantics with feature-based geometry and spatial relationships, enabling spatiotemporal queries using SPARQL through ontological concepts. The implementation of this framework involves virtual querying, which refers to dynamically constructing the geospatial knowledge graph during the querying process. This approach eliminates the need to pre-translate all data into a KG, thereby reducing redundancy and cutting storage and processing costs. View this paper
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31 pages, 17346 KiB  
Article
Spatiotemporal Analytics of Environmental Sounds and Influencing Factors Based on Urban Sensor Network Data
by Yanjie Zhao, Jin Cheng, Shaohua Wang, Lei Qin and Xueyan Zhang
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 386; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090386 - 21 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1223
Abstract
Urban construction has accelerated the deterioration of the urban sound environment, which has constrained urban development and harmed people’s health. This study aims to explore the spatiotemporal patterns of environmental sound and determine the influencing factors on the spatial differentiation of sound, thus [...] Read more.
Urban construction has accelerated the deterioration of the urban sound environment, which has constrained urban development and harmed people’s health. This study aims to explore the spatiotemporal patterns of environmental sound and determine the influencing factors on the spatial differentiation of sound, thus supporting sustainable urban planning and decision-making. Fine-grained sound data are used in most urban sound-related research, but such data are difficult to obtain. For this problem, this study analyzed sound trends using Array of Things (AoT) sensing data. Additionally, this study explored the influences on the spatial differentiation of sound using GeoDetector (version number: 1.0-4), thus addressing the limitation of previous studies that neglected to explore the influences on spatial heterogeneity. Our experimental results showed that sound levels in different areas of Chicago fluctuated irregularly over time. During the morning peak on weekdays: the four southern areas of Chicago have a high–high sound gathering mode, and the remaining areas are mostly randomly distributed; the sound level of a certain area has a significant negative correlation with population density, park area, and density of bike route; park area and population density are the main factors affecting the spatial heterogeneity of Chicago’s sound; and population density and park area play an essential role in factor interaction. This study has some theoretical significance and practical value. Residents can choose areas with lower noise for leisure activities according to the noise map of this study. While planning urban development, urban planners should pay attention to the single and interactive effects of factors in the city, such as parks, road network structures, and points of interest, on the urban sound environment. Researchers can build on this study to conduct studies on larger time scales. Full article
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22 pages, 3489 KiB  
Article
Carbon Emission Patterns and Carbon Balance Zoning in Urban Territorial Spaces Based on Multisource Data: A Case Study of Suzhou City, China
by Zhenlong Zhang, Xiaoping Yu, Yanzhen Hou, Tianhao Chen, Yun Lu and Honghu Sun
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 385; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090385 - 20 Sep 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1291
Abstract
The concept of green and low-carbon development is integrated into territorial spatial planning and district control research. It is one of the systematic policy tools for emission reduction and carbon sequestration, greatly contributing to achieving the double carbon goal. This paper presents a [...] Read more.
The concept of green and low-carbon development is integrated into territorial spatial planning and district control research. It is one of the systematic policy tools for emission reduction and carbon sequestration, greatly contributing to achieving the double carbon goal. This paper presents a method for measuring the carbon emissions of urban territorial spaces using multisource big data, aiming to identify the spatial patterns and levels of carbon emissions at microspatial scales. The spatial patterns of carbon emissions were used to construct a carbon balance zoning method to evaluate the regional differences in the spatial distribution of carbon emissions, taking Suzhou as an example to achieve carbon balance zoning at the micro scale of the city. Based on our research, the following was determined: (1) Suzhou’s total carbon emissions in 2020 was approximately 240.3 million tons, with the industrial sector accounting for 81.32% of these emissions. The total carbon sink was about 0.025 million tons. (2) In Suzhou City, the high-value plots of carbon emissions are mainly located in industrial agglomeration areas. By contrast, low-value plots are primarily located in suburban areas and various carbon sink functional areas, exhibiting a scattered distribution. (3) The territorial space unit was divided into four functional areas of carbon balance, with 36 low-carbon economic zone units accounting for 37.11%, 29 carbon-source control zone units accounting for 29.90%, 14 carbon-sink functional zone units accounting for 14.43%, and 18 high-carbon optimization zone units accounting for 18.56%. As a result of this study, carbon balance zoning was achieved at the grassroots space level, which will assist the city in low-carbon and refined urban governance. Some ideas and references are also provided to formulate policies for low-carbon development at the micro scale of a city. Full article
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19 pages, 8508 KiB  
Article
Influence of the Built Environment on Pedestrians’ Route Choice in Leisure Walking
by Yifu Ge, Zhongyu He and Kai Shang
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 384; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090384 - 19 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1129
Abstract
Exploring the relationship between leisure walking and the built environment will provide an improvement in human health and well-being. It is, therefore, necessary to explore the most relevant scale for leisure walking and how the association between the built environment and leisure walking [...] Read more.
Exploring the relationship between leisure walking and the built environment will provide an improvement in human health and well-being. It is, therefore, necessary to explore the most relevant scale for leisure walking and how the association between the built environment and leisure walking varies across scales. Three hundred volunteers were recruited to wear GPS loggers, and a total dataset of 268 tracks from 105 individuals was collected. The shortest possible routes between starting and ending points were generated and compared to the actual routes using the paired T-test. An improved grid-based buffer approach was proposed, and statistics for the grid cells intersecting the paths were calculated. Grid cells were calculated for six scales: 50 m, 100 m, 200 m, 500 m, 800 m, and 1600 m. The results showed that the actual paths were on average 24.97% longer than the shortest path. The mean, standard deviation, and minimum and maximum values of the built environment variables were all significantly associated with leisure walking. The most relevant spatial scale was found to be the 100 m scale. Overall, the smaller the scale, the more significant the association. Participants showed a preference for moderately compact urban forms, diverse options for destinations, and greener landscapes in leisure walking route choice. Full article
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38 pages, 7226 KiB  
Article
An Ontology-Based Knowledge Representation Method for Typhoon Events from Chinese News Reports
by Danjie Chen, Yan Zheng, Liqun Ma and Fen Qin
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 383; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090383 - 19 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1175
Abstract
Typhoons are destructive weather events. News media reports contain large amounts of typhoon information. Transforming this information into useful knowledge to provide a basis for mining typhoon knowledge and supporting disaster prevention and relief is urgently required to solve this problem. Knowledge representation [...] Read more.
Typhoons are destructive weather events. News media reports contain large amounts of typhoon information. Transforming this information into useful knowledge to provide a basis for mining typhoon knowledge and supporting disaster prevention and relief is urgently required to solve this problem. Knowledge representation can be used to address this problem, although it presents several challenges. These challenges lie in expressing the static and dynamic characteristics of typhoons and formalizing the knowledge representation method and making it suitable for machine processing. Moreover, the general Chinese time and space representation method is overly cumbersome for use in ontologies. The present study proposes an ontology-based typhoon event representation method that solves the representation problems of the typhoon static concept and dynamic features. Furthermore, it summarizes the fixed patterns of time and space in Chinese news and designs a time and space model suitable for typhoon event ontologies. From the ontology population, typhoon event ontology instances are created, and the typhoon event ontology model is applied to the analysis of typhoon processes, verifying the effectiveness of the typhoon event ontology model. Full article
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25 pages, 16002 KiB  
Article
Cross-Attention-Guided Feature Alignment Network for Road Crack Detection
by Chuan Xu, Qi Zhang, Liye Mei, Xiufeng Chang, Zhaoyi Ye, Junjian Wang, Lang Ye and Wei Yang
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 382; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090382 - 19 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1101
Abstract
Road crack detection is one of the important issues in the field of traffic safety and urban planning. Currently, road damage varies in type and scale, and often has different sizes and depths, making the detection task more challenging. To address this problem, [...] Read more.
Road crack detection is one of the important issues in the field of traffic safety and urban planning. Currently, road damage varies in type and scale, and often has different sizes and depths, making the detection task more challenging. To address this problem, we propose a Cross-Attention-guided Feature Alignment Network (CAFANet) for extracting and integrating multi-scale features of road damage. Firstly, we use a dual-branch visual encoder model with the same structure but different patch sizes (one large patch and one small patch) to extract multi-level damage features. We utilize a Cross-Layer Interaction (CLI) module to establish interaction between the corresponding layers of the two branches, combining their unique feature extraction capability and contextual understanding. Secondly, we employ a Feature Alignment Block (FAB) to align the features from different levels or branches in terms of semantics and spatial aspects, which significantly improves the CAFANet’s perception of the damage regions, reduces background interference, and achieves more precise detection and segmentation of damage. Finally, we adopt multi-layer convolutional segmentation heads to obtain high-resolution feature maps. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct experiments on the public CRACK500 dataset and compare it with other mainstream methods. Experimental results demonstrate that CAFANet achieves excellent performance in road crack detection tasks, which exhibits significant improvements in terms of F1 score and accuracy, with an F1 score of 73.22% and an accuracy of 96.78%. Full article
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19 pages, 8551 KiB  
Article
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Machine Learning and Classical Approaches for Spaceborne Active-Passive Fusion Bathymetry of Coral Reefs
by Jian Cheng, Liang Cheng, Sensen Chu, Jizhe Li, Qixin Hu, Li Ye, Zhiyong Wang and Hui Chen
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 381; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090381 - 19 Sep 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1259
Abstract
Satellite-derived bathymetry (SDB) techniques are increasingly valuable for deriving high-quality bathymetric maps of coral reefs. Investigating the performance of the related SDB algorithms in purely spaceborne active–passive fusion bathymetry contributes to formulating reliable bathymetric strategies, particularly for areas such as the Spratly Islands, [...] Read more.
Satellite-derived bathymetry (SDB) techniques are increasingly valuable for deriving high-quality bathymetric maps of coral reefs. Investigating the performance of the related SDB algorithms in purely spaceborne active–passive fusion bathymetry contributes to formulating reliable bathymetric strategies, particularly for areas such as the Spratly Islands, where in situ observations are exceptionally scarce. In this study, we took Anda Reef as a case study and evaluated the performance of eight common SDB approaches by integrating Sentinel-2 images with Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2). The bathymetric maps were generated using two classical and six machine-learning algorithms, which were then validated with measured sonar data. The results illustrated that all models accurately estimated the depth of coral reefs in the 0–20 m range. The classical algorithms (Lyzenga and Stumpf) exhibited a mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of less than 0.990 m, 1.386 m, and 11.173%, respectively. The machine learning algorithms generally outperformed the classical algorithms in accuracy and bathymetric detail, with a coefficient of determination (R2) ranging from 0.94 to 0.96 and an RMSE ranging from 1.034 m to 1.202 m. The multilayer perceptron (MLP) achieved the highest accuracy and consistency with an RMSE of as low as 1.034 m, followed by the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) (1.070 m). Our results provide a practical reference for selecting SDB algorithms to accurately obtain shallow water bathymetry in subsequent studies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Topic Advances in Earth Observation and Geosciences)
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26 pages, 18181 KiB  
Article
Assessing the Hazard Degree of Wadi Malham Basin in Saudi Arabia and Its Impact on North Train Railway Infrastructure
by Fatmah Nassir Alqreai and Hamad Ahmed Altuwaijri
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 380; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090380 - 17 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1321
Abstract
The North Train Railway in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) extends over vast areas, crossing various terrains, including valleys, sand veins, plateaus, and hills. Therefore, the railway was designed and implemented to suit this environmental diversity under the highest safety standards. However, [...] Read more.
The North Train Railway in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) extends over vast areas, crossing various terrains, including valleys, sand veins, plateaus, and hills. Therefore, the railway was designed and implemented to suit this environmental diversity under the highest safety standards. However, the railway may be subject to hazards for various reasons. In general, the possibility of direct surface runoff disasters increases if there are residential areas and facilities within the boundaries of drainage basins. Therefore, these areas should be studied, and the degree of hazard in drainage basins should be accurately determined. Hence, this study analyzed the degree of risk of 14 drainage basins affecting the North Train Railway within the Wadi Malham drainage basin. The risk degree model was used with eight parameters that have hydrological indications to give an idea of the behavior of direct surface runoff and alter the risk of direct surface runoff. We found that 28.57% of the total basins in the study area have overall score values indicating they are high-risk basins, namely basins 6, 7, 13, and 14. It is recommended to estimate the rainfall depth during different return periods, analyze soil permeability and land use classification in the study area, and apply hydrological modeling of drainage basins, which contributes to estimating the volume and peak of direct surface runoff in such arid and semi-arid environments that do not contain hydrometric stations to monitor the runoff. Full article
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25 pages, 4280 KiB  
Article
A Wandering Detection Method Based on Processing GPS Trajectories Using the Wavelet Packet Decomposition Transform for People with Cognitive Impairment
by Naghmeh Jafarpournaser, Mahmoud Reza Delavar and Maryam Noroozian
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 379; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090379 - 17 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1126
Abstract
The increasing prevalence of cognitive disorders among the elderly is a significant consequence of the global aging phenomenon. Wandering stands out as the most prominent and challenging symptom in these patients, with potential irreversible consequences such as loss or even death. Thus, harnessing [...] Read more.
The increasing prevalence of cognitive disorders among the elderly is a significant consequence of the global aging phenomenon. Wandering stands out as the most prominent and challenging symptom in these patients, with potential irreversible consequences such as loss or even death. Thus, harnessing technological advancements to mitigate caregiving burdens and disease-related repercussions becomes paramount. Numerous studies have developed algorithms and smart healthcare and telemedicine systems for wandering detection. Broadly, these algorithms fall into two categories: those estimating path complexity and those relying on historical trajectory data. However, motion signal processing methods are rarely employed in this context. This paper proposes a motion-signal-processing-based algorithm utilizing the wavelet packet transform (WPT) with a fourth-order Coiflet mother wavelet. The algorithm identifies wandering patterns solely based on patients’ positional data on the current traversed path and variations in wavelet coefficients within the frequency–time spectrum of motion signals. The model’s independence from prior motion behavior data enhances its compatibility with the pronounced instability often seen in these patients. A performance assessment of the proposed algorithm using the Geolife open-source dataset achieved accuracy, precision, specificity, recall, and F-score metrics of 83.06%, 92.62%, 83.06%, 83.06%, and 87.58%, respectively. Timely wandering detection not only prevents irreversible consequences but also serves as a potential indicator of progression to severe Alzheimer’s in patients with mild cognitive impairment, enabling timely interventions for preventing disease progression. This underscores the importance of advancing wandering detection algorithms. Full article
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14 pages, 692 KiB  
Article
A Latent-Factor-Model-Based Approach for Traffic Data Imputation with Road Network Information
by Xing Su, Wenjie Sun, Chenting Song, Zhi Cai and Limin Guo
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 378; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090378 - 15 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1230
Abstract
With the rapid development of the economy, car ownership has grown rapidly, which causes many traffic problems. In recent years, intelligent transportation systems have been used to solve various traffic problems. To achieve effective and efficient traffic management, intelligent transportation systems need a [...] Read more.
With the rapid development of the economy, car ownership has grown rapidly, which causes many traffic problems. In recent years, intelligent transportation systems have been used to solve various traffic problems. To achieve effective and efficient traffic management, intelligent transportation systems need a large amount of complete traffic data. However, the current traffic data collection methods result in different forms of missing data. In the last twenty years, although many approaches have been proposed to impute missing data based on different mechanisms, these all have their limitations, which leads to low imputation accuracy, especially when the collected traffic data have a large amount of missing values. To this end, this paper proposes a latent-factor-model-based approach to impute the missing traffic data. In the proposed approach, the spatial information of the road network is first combined with the spatiotemporal matrix of the original traffic data. Then, the latent-factor-model-based algorithm is employed to impute the missing data in the combined matrix of the traffic data. Based on the real traffic data from METR-LA, we found that the imputation accuracy of the proposed approach was better than that of most of the current traffic-data-imputation approaches, especially when the original traffic data are limited. Full article
(This article belongs to the Topic Artificial Intelligence in Navigation)
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16 pages, 1629 KiB  
Article
Spatio-Temporal Information Extraction and Geoparsing for Public Chinese Resumes
by Xiaolong Li, Wu Zhang, Yanjie Wang, Yongbin Tan and Jing Xia
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 377; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090377 - 13 Sep 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1166
Abstract
As an important carrier of individual information, the resume is an important data source for studying the spatio-temporal evolutionary characteristics of individual and group behaviors. This study focuses on spatio-temporal information extraction and geoparsing from resumes to provide basic technical support for spatio-temporal [...] Read more.
As an important carrier of individual information, the resume is an important data source for studying the spatio-temporal evolutionary characteristics of individual and group behaviors. This study focuses on spatio-temporal information extraction and geoparsing from resumes to provide basic technical support for spatio-temporal research based on resume text. Most current studies on resume text information extraction are oriented toward recruitment work, such as the automated information extraction, classification, and recommendation of resumes. These studies ignore the spatio-temporal information of individual and group behaviors implied in resumes. Therefore, this study takes the public resumes of teachers in key universities in China as the research data, proposes a set of spatio-temporal information extraction solutions for electronic resumes of public figures, and designs a spatial entity geoparsing method, which can effectively extract and spatially locate spatio-temporal information in the resumes. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, text information extraction models such as BiLSTM-CRF, BERT-CRF, and BERT-BiLSTM-CRF are selected to conduct comparative experiments, and the spatial entity geoparsing method is verified. The experimental results show that the precision of the selected models on the named entity recognition task is 96.23% and the precision of the designed spatial entity geoparsing method is 97.91%. Full article
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21 pages, 6474 KiB  
Article
Redesigning Graphical User Interface of Open-Source Geospatial Software in a Community-Driven Way: A Case Study of GRASS GIS
by Linda Karlovska, Anna Petrasova, Vaclav Petras and Martin Landa
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 376; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090376 - 10 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1548
Abstract
Learning to use geographic information system (GIS) software effectively may be intimidating due to the extensive range of features it offers. The GRASS GIS software, in particular, presents additional challenges for first-time users in terms of its complex startup procedure and unique terminology [...] Read more.
Learning to use geographic information system (GIS) software effectively may be intimidating due to the extensive range of features it offers. The GRASS GIS software, in particular, presents additional challenges for first-time users in terms of its complex startup procedure and unique terminology associated with its data structure. On the other hand, a substantial part of the GRASS user community including us as developers recognized and embraced the advantages of the current approach. Given the controversial nature of the whole issue, we decided to actively involve regular users by conducting several formal surveys and by performing usability testing. Throughout this process, we discovered that resolving specific software issues through pure user-centered design is not always feasible, particularly in the context of open-source scientific software where the boundary between users and developers is very fuzzy. To address this challenge, we adopted the user-centered methodology tailored to the requirements of open-source scientific software development, which we refer to as community-driven design. This paper describes the community-driven redesigning process on the GRASS GIS case study and sets a foundation for applying community-driven design in other open-source scientific projects by providing insights into effective software development practices driven by the needs and input of the project’s community. Full article
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30 pages, 32076 KiB  
Article
An Ontology-Based Framework for Geospatial Integration and Querying of Raster Data Cube Using Virtual Knowledge Graphs
by Younes Hamdani, Guohui Xiao, Linfang Ding and Diego Calvanese
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 375; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090375 - 08 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1870
Abstract
The integration of the raster data cube alongside another form of geospatial data (e.g., vector data) raises considerable challenges when it comes to managing and representing it using knowledge graphs. Such integration can play an invaluable role in handling the heterogeneity of geospatial [...] Read more.
The integration of the raster data cube alongside another form of geospatial data (e.g., vector data) raises considerable challenges when it comes to managing and representing it using knowledge graphs. Such integration can play an invaluable role in handling the heterogeneity of geospatial data and linking the raster data cube to semantic technology standards. Many recent approaches have been attempted to address this issue, but they often lack robust formal elaboration or solely concentrate on integrating raster data cubes without considering the inclusion of semantic spatial entities along with their spatial relationships. This may constitute a major shortcoming when it comes to performing advanced geospatial queries and semantically enriching geospatial models. In this paper, we propose a framework that can enable such semantic integration and advanced querying of raster data cubes based on the virtual knowledge graph (VKG) paradigm. This framework defines a semantic representation model for raster data cubes that extends the GeoSPARQL ontology. With such a model, we can combine the semantics of raster data cubes with features-based models that involve geometries as well as spatial and topological relationships. This could allow us to formulate spatiotemporal queries using SPARQL in a natural way by using ontological concepts at an appropriate level of abstraction. We propose an implementation of the proposed framework based on a VKG system architecture. In addition, we perform an experimental evaluation to compare our framework with other existing systems in terms of performance and scalability. Finally, we show the potential and the limitations of our implementation and we discuss several possible future works. Full article
(This article belongs to the Topic Geospatial Knowledge Graph)
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18 pages, 2550 KiB  
Article
Geospatial Analysis in Web Browsers—Comparison Study on WebGIS Process-Based Applications
by Rostislav Netek, Tereza Pohankova, Oldrich Bittner and Daniel Urban
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 374; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090374 - 07 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1485
Abstract
With the rapid development of internet technologies in recent years, the shift from the desktop to the web platform can be seen within geospatial analysis. While analytical tools, such as buffer or clip, are routinely used in desktop environments, WebGIS deals with geographic [...] Read more.
With the rapid development of internet technologies in recent years, the shift from the desktop to the web platform can be seen within geospatial analysis. While analytical tools, such as buffer or clip, are routinely used in desktop environments, WebGIS deals with geographic information, including geospatial analysis, within the online environment. The main aim of this paper is to perform a comparison and evaluation of vector-oriented online geoprocessing tools in a WebGIS environment, supported by the development of a custom solution for geospatial analysis. The application called GeOnline is developed and tested as a case study to demonstrate the availability of spatial analysis tools within the web browser. It implements the specialized geospatial library Turf.js, which allows using non-trivial geospatial analysis, such as intersect, clip or calculate centroids. It handles client-side processes. Both a functionality comparison and performance testing are carried out, while the paper primarily focuses on data-driven (data-based) analysis and not only on visual-driven (visual-based) analysis. The comparative study evaluates five geospatial tools (ArcGIS Online, GISCloud, CARTO, FOURSQUARE, GeOnline) and summarizes the solutions from different aspects, including the number of supported operations. Finally, performance tests on GeOnline separately and among alternative solutions are performed. While ArcGIS Online is considered the most comprehensive solution on the market, GeOnline performs well compared to alternative solutions. Full article
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21 pages, 6217 KiB  
Article
Novel CNN-Based Approach for Reading Urban Form Data in 2D Images: An Application for Predicting Restaurant Location in Seoul, Korea
by Jeyun Yang and Youngsang Kwon
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 373; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090373 - 07 Sep 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1439
Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated its ability to complete complex tasks in various fields. In urban studies, AI technology has been utilized in some limited domains, such as control of traffic and air quality. This study uses AI to better understand diverse urban [...] Read more.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated its ability to complete complex tasks in various fields. In urban studies, AI technology has been utilized in some limited domains, such as control of traffic and air quality. This study uses AI to better understand diverse urban studies data through a novel approach that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN). In this study, a building outline in the form of a two-dimensional image is used with its corresponding metadata to test the applicability of CNN in reading urban data. MobileNet, a high-efficiency CNN model, is trained to predict the location of restaurants in each building in Seoul, Korea. Consequently, using only 2D image data, the model satisfactorily predicts the locations of restaurants (AUC = 0.732); the model with 2D images and their metadata has higher performance but has an overfitting problem. In addition, the model using only 2D image data accurately predicts the regional distribution of restaurants and shows some typical urban forms with restaurants. The proposed model has several technical limitations but shows the potential to provide a further understanding of urban settings. Full article
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21 pages, 4240 KiB  
Article
Detecting Turning Relationships and Time Restrictions of OSM Road Intersections from Crowdsourced Trajectories
by Xin Chen, Longgang Xiang, Fengwei Jiao and Huayi Wu
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 372; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090372 - 06 Sep 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1105
Abstract
OpenStreetMap (OSM) road networks provide public digital maps underlying many spatial applications such as routing engines and navigation services. However, turning relationships and time restrictions at OSM intersections are lacking in these maps, posing a threat to the accuracy and reliability of the [...] Read more.
OpenStreetMap (OSM) road networks provide public digital maps underlying many spatial applications such as routing engines and navigation services. However, turning relationships and time restrictions at OSM intersections are lacking in these maps, posing a threat to the accuracy and reliability of the services. In this paper, a new turn information detection method for OSM intersections using the dynamic connection information from crowdsourced trajectory data is proposed to address this problem. In this solution, the OSM intersection structure is extracted and simplified and crowdsourced trajectories are projected onto OSM road segments using an improved Hidden Markov Model (HMM) map matching method that explicitly traces the turning connections in road networks. Optimal path analysis increases the turning support related to short road segments. On this basis, this study transforms complex turning identification scenarios into the simple analyses of traffic connectivity. Furthermore, a voting strategy is used to identify and calculate turning time restrictions. The experimental results, using trajectory data from three cities in China, show that the turning relationships can be detected at a precision of 90.71% with a recall of 96.55% and an F1-value of 93.54% in Shanghai. For Wuhan, the precision is 95.33% and the recall is 95.00%, with an F1-value of 95.16%. The precision and recall when identifying turning time restrictions both reach 90% in Xiamen. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed turning detection method. Full article
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22 pages, 4047 KiB  
Article
Nonlinear Hierarchical Effects of Housing Prices and Built Environment Based on Multiscale Life Circle—A Case Study of Chengdu
by Yandi Song, Shaoyao Zhang and Wei Deng
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 371; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090371 - 06 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1267
Abstract
Determining the optimal planning scale for urban life circles and analyzing the associated built environment factors are crucial for comprehending and regulating residential differentiation. This study aims to bridge the current research void concerning the nonlinear hierarchical relationships between the built environment and [...] Read more.
Determining the optimal planning scale for urban life circles and analyzing the associated built environment factors are crucial for comprehending and regulating residential differentiation. This study aims to bridge the current research void concerning the nonlinear hierarchical relationships between the built environment and residential differentiation under the multiscale effect. Specifically, six indicators were derived from urban crowdsourcing data: diversity of built environment function (DBEF1), density of built environment function (DBEF2), blue–green environment (BGE), traffic accessibility (TA), population vitality (PV), and shopping vitality (SV). Then, a gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) was applied to derive the analysis of these indicators. Finally, the interpretability of machine learning was leveraged to quantify the relative importance and nonlinear relationships between built environment indicators and housing prices. The results indicate a hierarchical structure and inflection point effect of the built environment on residential premiums. Notably, the impact trend of the built environment on housing prices within a 15 min life circle remains stable. The effect of crowd behavior, as depicted by PV and SV, on housing prices emerges as the most significant factor. Furthermore, this study also categorizes housing into common and high-end residences, thereby unveiling that distinct residential neighborhoods exhibit varying degrees of dependence on the built environment. The built environment exerts a scale effect on the formation of residential differentiation, with housing prices exhibiting increased sensitivity to the built environment at a smaller life circle scale. Conversely, the effect of the built environment on housing prices is amplified at a larger life circle scale. Under the dual influence of the scale and hierarchical effect, this framework can dynamically adapt to the uncertainty of changes in life circle planning policies and residential markets. This provides strong theoretical support for exploring the optimal life circle scale, alleviating residential differentiation, and promoting group fairness. Full article
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25 pages, 6669 KiB  
Article
A Multi-Framework of Google Earth Engine and GEV for Spatial Analysis of Extremes in Non-Stationary Condition in Southeast Queensland, Australia
by Hadis Pakdel, Dev Raj Paudyal, Sreeni Chadalavada, Md Jahangir Alam and Majid Vazifedoust
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 370; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090370 - 06 Sep 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1313
Abstract
The frequency and severity of extremes, including extreme precipitation events, extreme evapotranspiration and extreme water storage deficit events, are changing. Thus, the necessity for developing a framework that estimates non-stationary conditions is urgent. The aim of this paper is to develop a framework [...] Read more.
The frequency and severity of extremes, including extreme precipitation events, extreme evapotranspiration and extreme water storage deficit events, are changing. Thus, the necessity for developing a framework that estimates non-stationary conditions is urgent. The aim of this paper is to develop a framework using the geeSEBAL platform, Generalised Extreme Value (GEV) models and spatiotemporal analysis techniques that incorporate the physical system in terms of cause and effect. Firstly, the geeSEBAL platform has enabled the estimation of actual evapotranspiration (ETa) with an unprecedented level of spatial-temporal resolution. Following this, the Non-stationary Extreme Value Analysis (NEVA) approach employs the Bayesian method using a Differential Evolution Markov Chain technique to calculate the frequency and magnitude of extreme values across the parameter space. Station and global climate datasets have been used to analyse the spatial and temporal variation of rainfall, reference evapotranspiration (ETo), ETa and water storage (WS) variables in the Lockyer Valley located in Southeast Queensland (SEQ), Australia. Frequency analysis of rainfall, ETa, and water storage deficit for 14 stations were performed using a GEV distribution under stationary and non-stationary assumptions. Comparing the ETa, ETo and ERA5 rainfall with station data showed reasonable agreement as follows: Pearson correlation of 0.59–0.75 for ETa, RMSE of 45.23–58.56 mm for ETa, Pearson correlation of 0.96–0.97 for ETo, RMSE of 73.13–87.73 mm for ETo and Pearson correlation of 0.87–0.92 for rainfall and RMSE of 37.53–57.10 mm for rainfall. The lower and upper uncertainty bounds between stationary and non-stationary conditions for rainfall station data of Gatton varied from 550.98 mm (stationary) to 624.97 mm (non-stationary), and for ERA5 rainfall datasets, 441.30 mm (stationary) to 450.77 mm (non-stationary). The results demonstrate that global climate datasets underestimate the difference between stationary and non-stationary conditions by 9.47 mm compared to results of 73.99 mm derived from station data. Similarly, the results demonstrate less variation between stationary and non-stationary conditions in water storage, followed by a sharp variation in rainfall and moderate variation in evapotranspiration. The findings of this study indicate that neglecting the non-stationary condition in some hydrometeorological variables can lead to underestimating their amounts. This framework can be applied to any geographical area for estimating extreme conditions, providing valuable insights for infrastructure planning and design, risk assessment and disaster management. Full article
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21 pages, 6051 KiB  
Article
Large-Scale Mobile-Based Analysis for National Travel Demand Modeling
by Bat-hen Nahmias-Biran, Shuki Cohen, Vladimir Simon and Israel Feldman
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 369; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090369 - 05 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1042
Abstract
Mobile phones have achieved a high rate of penetration and gained great interest in the field of travel behavior studies. However, mobile phone data exploitation for national travel models has only been sporadically studied thus far. This work focuses on one of the [...] Read more.
Mobile phones have achieved a high rate of penetration and gained great interest in the field of travel behavior studies. However, mobile phone data exploitation for national travel models has only been sporadically studied thus far. This work focuses on one of the most extensive cellular surveys of its kind carried out thus far in the world, which was performed for two years between 2018 and 2019 with the participation of the two largest cellular providers in Israel, as well as leading GPS companies. The large-scale cell phone survey covered half the population using cellphones aged 8+ in Israel and uncovered local and national trip patterns, revealing the structure of nationwide travel demand. The methodology consists of the following steps: (1) plausibility and quality checks for the data of the mobile operators and the GPS data providers; (2) algorithm development for trip detection, home/work location detection, location and time accuracy, and expansion factors; (3) accuracy test of origin–destination matrices at different resolutions, revisions of algorithms, and reproduction of data; and (4) validation of results by comparison to reliable external data sources. The results are characterized by high accuracy and representativeness of demand and indicate a strong correlation between the cellular survey and other reliable sources. Full article
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21 pages, 7309 KiB  
Article
A Spatial Information Extraction Method Based on Multi-Modal Social Media Data: A Case Study on Urban Inundation
by Yilong Wu, Yingjie Chen, Rongyu Zhang, Zhenfei Cui, Xinyi Liu, Jiayi Zhang, Meizhen Wang and Yong Wu
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 368; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090368 - 05 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1467
Abstract
With the proliferation and development of social media platforms, social media data have become an important source for acquiring spatiotemporal information on various urban events. Providing accurate spatiotemporal information for events contributes to enhancing the capabilities of urban management and emergency responses. However, [...] Read more.
With the proliferation and development of social media platforms, social media data have become an important source for acquiring spatiotemporal information on various urban events. Providing accurate spatiotemporal information for events contributes to enhancing the capabilities of urban management and emergency responses. However, existing research regarding mining spatiotemporal information of events often solely focuses on textual content and neglects data from other modalities such as images and videos. Therefore, this study proposes an innovative spatiotemporal information extraction method, which extracts the spatiotemporal information of events from multimodal data on Weibo at coarse- and fine-grained hierarchical levels and serves as a beneficial supplement to existing urban event monitoring methods. This paper utilizes the “20 July 2021 Zhengzhou Heavy Rainfall” incident as an example to evaluate and analyze the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results indicate that in coarse-grained spatial information extraction using only textual data, our method achieved a spatial precision of 87.54% within a 60 m range and reached 100% spatial precision for ranges beyond 200 m. For fine-grained spatial information extraction, the introduction of other modal data, such as images and videos, resulted in a significant improvement in spatial error. These results demonstrate the ability of the MIST-SMMD (Method of Identifying Spatiotemporal Information of Social Media Multimodal Data) to extract spatiotemporal information from urban events at both coarse and fine levels and confirm the significant advantages of multimodal data in enhancing the precision of spatial information extraction. Full article
(This article belongs to the Topic Urban Sensing Technologies)
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22 pages, 28169 KiB  
Article
Evolution of the Urban Network in the Upper Yellow River Region of China: Enterprise Flow, Network Connections, and Influence Mechanisms—A Case Study of the Ningxia Urban Agglomeration along the Yellow River
by Jiagang Zhai, Mingji Li, Mengjiao Ming, Marbiya Yimit and Jinlu Bi
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 367; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090367 - 05 Sep 2023
Viewed by 980
Abstract
Given the significant role of the Ningxia Urban Agglomeration along the Yellow River in reshaping the urban network and promoting coordinated development in the upper Yellow River region of China, this paper takes enterprise flow as the explicit manifestation of the regional urban [...] Read more.
Given the significant role of the Ningxia Urban Agglomeration along the Yellow River in reshaping the urban network and promoting coordinated development in the upper Yellow River region of China, this paper takes enterprise flow as the explicit manifestation of the regional urban network and interprets the evolution of the regional urban network structure and its influencing mechanisms through the different types of enterprise flow. The results indicate the following: (1) The external network is primarily focused on outflow investments towards North China, East China, and Northwest China. The overall inflow sources form a multi-origin structure dominated by North China and East China. Jinfeng and Xingqing serve as core hubs for enterprise exports in the external network and destinations for incoming enterprises. However, in terms of productive manufacturing connections, there is a spatial organizational pattern driven by multiple cities. (2) In the internal network, there is a concentric connection structure centered around Jinfeng and Xingqing. The productive service connections are relatively active, while the productive manufacturing connections are relatively concentrated between Jinfeng, Xingqing, Ningdong, and Lingwu. (3) In the external network, the main feature is the absorption of external elements to foster development momentum. In the internal network, Jinfeng and Xingqing serve as the contact and radiation sources, influencing various nodes. However, the driving capacity is weak. (4) The market demand and coordinated development both demonstrate significant promoting effects on the connections within the external and internal networks. The sluggish adjustment and transformation of the regional industrial structure resulted in a temporary negative inhibitory effect on the development of transformation. The negative impact of urban investment activities and the positive impact of government management are reflected within the internal network. (5) Improvements in urban management and service functions as well as external borrowing can promote connection in different networks. However, borrowing economic activity can have a negative impact in different networks. (6) Industrial agglomeration can promote enterprise connections in different networks and generate spatial spillover effects. Full article
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22 pages, 9732 KiB  
Article
Gated Recurrent Unit Embedded with Dual Spatial Convolution for Long-Term Traffic Flow Prediction
by Qingyong Zhang, Lingfeng Zhou, Yixin Su, Huiwen Xia and Bingrong Xu
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 366; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090366 - 05 Sep 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 994
Abstract
Considering the spatial and temporal correlation of traffic flow data is essential to improve the accuracy of traffic flow prediction. This paper proposes a traffic flow prediction model named Dual Spatial Convolution Gated Recurrent Unit (DSC-GRU). In particular, the GRU is embedded with [...] Read more.
Considering the spatial and temporal correlation of traffic flow data is essential to improve the accuracy of traffic flow prediction. This paper proposes a traffic flow prediction model named Dual Spatial Convolution Gated Recurrent Unit (DSC-GRU). In particular, the GRU is embedded with the DSC unit to enable the model to synchronously capture the spatiotemporal dependence. When considering spatial correlation, current prediction models consider only nearest-neighbor spatial features and ignore or simply overlay global spatial features. The DSC unit models the adjacent spatial dependence by the traditional static graph and the global spatial dependence through a novel dependency graph, which is generated by calculating the correlation between nodes based on the correlation coefficient. More than that, the DSC unit quantifies the different contributions of the adjacent and global spatial correlation with a modified gated mechanism. Experimental results based on two real-world datasets show that the DSC-GRU model can effectively capture the spatiotemporal dependence of traffic data. The prediction precision is better than the baseline and state-of-the-art models. Full article
(This article belongs to the Topic Geocomputation and Artificial Intelligence for Mapping)
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25 pages, 7400 KiB  
Article
Assessing Potable Water Access and Its Implications for Households’ Livelihoods: The Case of Sibi in the Nkwanta North District, Ghana
by Kingsley Kanjin, Richard Adade, Julia Quaicoe and Minxuan Lan
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 365; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090365 - 02 Sep 2023
Viewed by 2448
Abstract
Despite water being a basic human need, the residents of Sibi in Ghana’s Nkwanta North District struggle to obtain potable water, which negatively influences their livelihoods. This study aimed to evaluate the impacts on households’ livelihoods due to difficulties in accessing potable water [...] Read more.
Despite water being a basic human need, the residents of Sibi in Ghana’s Nkwanta North District struggle to obtain potable water, which negatively influences their livelihoods. This study aimed to evaluate the impacts on households’ livelihoods due to difficulties in accessing potable water and accordingly give policy recommendations. Data were collected through questionnaire surveys, interviews, geographic information systems (GIS), and remote sensing (RS) techniques. Questionnaire surveys were administered to 314 randomly selected household heads. The results indicated that the water sources available in Sibi were not sufficient; the boreholes and public tabs/standpipes in the communities were not dependable for regular access. As a result, households needed to depend on distant streams and dams for water. The households generally spent more than two hours at the water sources to collect water. Evidently, the Sibi residents did not have sufficient access to potable water, which severely affected their livelihoods. It is recommended that government agencies collaborate with related non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to help expand potable water projects in Sibi, Ghana. Full article
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19 pages, 2880 KiB  
Review
A Critical Review of Smart City Frameworks: New Criteria to Consider When Building Smart City Framework
by Fan Shi and Wenzhong Shi
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 364; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090364 - 01 Sep 2023
Viewed by 2158
Abstract
In the face of persistent challenges posed by urbanization and climate change, the contemporary era has witnessed a growing urgency for urban intelligence and sustainable development. Consequently, a plethora of smart city schedules and policies have emerged, with smart city assessment serving as [...] Read more.
In the face of persistent challenges posed by urbanization and climate change, the contemporary era has witnessed a growing urgency for urban intelligence and sustainable development. Consequently, a plethora of smart city schedules and policies have emerged, with smart city assessment serving as a pivotal benchmark for gauging policy effectiveness. However, owing to the inherent ambiguity of the smart city definition and the complexity of application scenarios, designers and decision-makers often struggle to ascertain their desired assessment frameworks swiftly and effectively. In this context, our study undertook a comprehensive analysis and comparative assessment of 33 recently introduced or inferred evaluation frameworks, drawn from a broad spectrum of extensive and longstanding research efforts. The overarching goal was to provide valuable reference points for designers and decision-makers navigating this intricate landscape. The assessment was conducted across seven key dimensions: generalizability, comprehensiveness, availability, flexibility, scientific rigor, transparency, and interpretability. These criteria hold the potential not only to guide the development trajectory and focus of upcoming smart city assessment models but also to serve as invaluable guidelines for stakeholders evaluating the outcomes of such models. Furthermore, they can serve as robust support for designers and decision-makers in their pursuit of targeted frameworks. Full article
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19 pages, 24985 KiB  
Article
A Method for Regularizing Buildings through Combining Skeleton Lines and Minkowski Addition
by Guoqing Chen and Haizhong Qian
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 363; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090363 - 01 Sep 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 895
Abstract
With the increasing availability of remote sensing images, the regularization of jagged building outlines extracted from high-resolution remote sensing images has become a current research hotspot. Based on an existing method proposed earlier by this author for extracting the skeleton lines of buildings [...] Read more.
With the increasing availability of remote sensing images, the regularization of jagged building outlines extracted from high-resolution remote sensing images has become a current research hotspot. Based on an existing method proposed earlier by this author for extracting the skeleton lines of buildings through integrating vector and raster data using jagged building skeleton lines as the input data, a new method is proposed here for regularizing building outlines through combining the skeleton lines with the Minkowski addition algorithm. Since the size and orientation of the structuring elements remain constant in the traditional morphological method, they can easily lead to large changes in the area between the regularized results and area of the original building. In this work, structuring elements are constructed with the adaptive adjustment of size and orientation. The proposed method has an outstanding ability to maintain the area of the original building. The orthogonal characteristics of the building can be better preserved via rotating the structuring elements. Finally, the angular bisector method is used to dissipate conflicts among the redundant vertices in the building outlines. In comparison to the simplification method used in QGIS software, the method proposed in this paper could reduce the variation in the area while maintaining the orthogonal characteristics of the building more significantly. Full article
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16 pages, 5332 KiB  
Article
Exploring Divergent Patterns and Dynamics of Urban and Active Rural Developments—A Case Study of Dezhou City
by Huimin Zhong, Zhengjia Liu and Yihang Huang
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 362; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090362 - 01 Sep 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 941
Abstract
Clarifying urban-rural spatial explicit structure changes is of great significance for understanding the urban-rural relationship evolution. Previous studies have mostly focused on urban internal spatial structure evolutions and less on the regional scale when it comes to exploring urban and rural evolutions. Nighttime [...] Read more.
Clarifying urban-rural spatial explicit structure changes is of great significance for understanding the urban-rural relationship evolution. Previous studies have mostly focused on urban internal spatial structure evolutions and less on the regional scale when it comes to exploring urban and rural evolutions. Nighttime light can timely reflect the human activities in regions and provides great potential for investigating the evolutions of urban and rural spatial explicit structures. Here, taking Dezhou City, a rapidly urbanizing city in China, as a case study, we employed the local contour tree method and nighttime light data to map urban and active rural extents from 2012 to 2020 and further explored their respective development processes. This study showed that unlike in rural regions, the internally explicit structures of urban regions were more complex, and there were often multiple hotspots inside them. The area of the urban-rural region increased significantly by 39.3% from 2012 to 2020 (p < 0.05). Populations were greatly responsible for the spatial explicit structure changes of urban and active rural regions. The urban and rural region rankings of the identified counties were basically consistent with the urban and rural population rankings. Unlike the perspectives of earlier land use (i.e., built-up land or impervious surface), this study underlined urban and active rural regions in view of the scope of active human activities. These results can likely help policymakers understand current active human activity extents and provide a data-based reference for future public services and infrastructure planning. Full article
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24 pages, 20361 KiB  
Article
Evaluation of Machine Learning Algorithms in the Classification of Multispectral Images from the Sentinel-2A/2B Orbital Sensor for Mapping the Environmental Dynamics of Ria Formosa (Algarve, Portugal)
by Flavo Elano Soares de Souza and José Inácio de Jesus Rodrigues
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 361; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090361 - 01 Sep 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1255
Abstract
With the growing availability of remote sensing orbital spatial data, the applications of machine learning (ML) algorithms have been leveraging the field of process automation in image classification. The present work aimed to evaluate the precision and accuracy of ML algorithms in the [...] Read more.
With the growing availability of remote sensing orbital spatial data, the applications of machine learning (ML) algorithms have been leveraging the field of process automation in image classification. The present work aimed to evaluate the precision and accuracy of ML algorithms in the classification of Sentinel 2A/2B images from an area of high environmental dynamics, such as Ria Formosa (Algarve, Portugal). The images were submitted to classification by groups of ML algorithms such as the Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Decision Tree (DT). The Orfeo Toolbox (OTB) open-source programming package made the algorithms available. Ten samples were collected for each of the 14 land use and cover classes in the Ria Formosa area, totaling 140 samples. Of these, 70% were for training and 30% for validating the classification. The evaluation metrics used were the class discrimination measures: Recall (R), the Global Kappa Index (k), and the General Accuracy Index (OA). The results showed that the KNN and DT algorithms demonstrated a greater discrimination capacity for most classes. SVM and RF significantly improved class discrimination when using larger samples for training. Merging the classified images significantly improved the classification accuracy, ranging from 71% to 81%. This evaluation made it possible to define sets of ML algorithms sensitive to change detection for mapping and monitoring dynamic environments. Full article
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23 pages, 10144 KiB  
Article
LBS Tag Cloud: A Centralized Tag Cloud for Visualization of Points of Interest in Location-Based Services
by Xiaoqiang Cheng, Zhongyu Liu, Huayi Wu and Haibo Xiao
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 360; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090360 - 01 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1418
Abstract
Taking location-based service (LBS) as the research scenario and aiming at the limitation of visualizing LBS points of interest (POI) in conventional web maps, this article proposes a visualization method of LBS-POI based on tag cloud, which is called “LBS tag cloud”. In [...] Read more.
Taking location-based service (LBS) as the research scenario and aiming at the limitation of visualizing LBS points of interest (POI) in conventional web maps, this article proposes a visualization method of LBS-POI based on tag cloud, which is called “LBS tag cloud”. In this method, the user location is taken as the layout center, and the name of the POI is converted into a text tag and then placed around the center. The tags’ size, color, and placement location are calculated based on other attributes of the POI. The calculation of placement location is at the core of the LBS tag cloud. Firstly, the tag’s initial placement position and layout priority are calculated based on polar coordinates, and the tags are placed in the initial placement position in the order of layout priority. Then, based on the force-directed model, a repulsive force is applied to the tag from the layout center to make it move to a position without overlapping with other tags. During the move, the quadtree partition of the text glyph is used to optimize the detection of overlaps between tags. Taking scenic spots as an example, the experimental results show that the LBS tag cloud can present the attributes and distribution of POIs completely and intuitively and can effectively represent the relationship between the POIs and user location, which is a new visualization form suitable for spatial cognition. Full article
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20 pages, 4003 KiB  
Article
Spatio-Temporal Relevance Classification from Geographic Texts Using Deep Learning
by Miao Tian, Xinxin Hu, Jiakai Huang, Kai Ma, Haiyan Li, Shuai Zheng, Liufeng Tao and Qinjun Qiu
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 359; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090359 - 01 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1307
Abstract
The growing proliferation of geographic information presents a substantial challenge to the traditional framework of a geographic information analysis and service. The dynamic integration and representation of geographic knowledge, such as triples, with spatio-temporal information play a crucial role in constructing a comprehensive [...] Read more.
The growing proliferation of geographic information presents a substantial challenge to the traditional framework of a geographic information analysis and service. The dynamic integration and representation of geographic knowledge, such as triples, with spatio-temporal information play a crucial role in constructing a comprehensive spatio-temporal knowledge graph and facilitating the effective utilization of spatio-temporal big data for knowledge-driven service applications. The existing knowledge graph (or geographic knowledge graph) takes spatio-temporal as the attribute of entity, ignoring the role of spatio-temporal information for accurate retrieval of entity objects and adaptive expression of entity objects. This study approaches the correlation between geographic knowledge and spatio-temporal information as a text classification problem, with the aim of addressing the challenge of establishing meaningful connections among spatio-temporal data using advanced deep learning techniques. Specifically, we leverage Wikipedia as a valuable data source for collecting and filtering geographic texts. The Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) tool is employed to extract triples from each sentence, followed by manual annotation of the sentences’ spatio-temporal relevance. This process leads to the formation of quadruples (time relevance/space relevance) or quintuples (spatio-temporal relevance). Subsequently, a comprehensive spatio-temporal classification dataset is constructed for experiment verification. Ten prominent deep learning text classification models are then utilized to conduct experiments covering various aspects of time, space, and spatio-temporal relationships. The experimental results demonstrate that the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer-Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (BERT-RCNN) model exhibits the highest performance among the evaluated models. Overall, this study establishes a foundation for future knowledge extraction endeavors. Full article
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24 pages, 8082 KiB  
Article
Chinese Modern Architectural Heritage Resources: Perspectives of Spatial Distribution and Influencing Factors
by Yidan Liao, Jeremy Cenci and Jiazhen Zhang
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 358; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090358 - 31 Aug 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1415
Abstract
Architectural heritage refers to buildings, complexes, and sites with historical, cultural, artistic, technological, and geographical values, including ancient buildings, historical buildings, places of interest, dwellings, and industrial sites. China’s 20th-Century Architectural Heritage List is a state-level list that includes architecture of historical, cultural, [...] Read more.
Architectural heritage refers to buildings, complexes, and sites with historical, cultural, artistic, technological, and geographical values, including ancient buildings, historical buildings, places of interest, dwellings, and industrial sites. China’s 20th-Century Architectural Heritage List is a state-level list that includes architecture of historical, cultural, technological, and artistic value in China in the 20th century. It is the carrier of the past century and the monument to witnessing the change in human knowledge, culture, technology, and even art. This list is from China, a country with a vast land area, a densely populated population, and numerous architectural relics. This study used ArcGIS to analyze 597 cases in 6 batches in China’s 20th-Century Architectural Heritage List. Its spatial structure was studied by calculating the nearest neighbor index, Gini coefficient, imbalance index, and kernel density. The results showed that the distribution of the Chinese modern architectural heritage resources is cohesive and uneven in China. Next, the geographical detector model was used to analyze its influencing factors from the perspective of 12 factors. This study found that the spatial distribution of this type of resource was condensed. The provincial level showed a distribution pattern of seven centers with one core and multiple scattered points. Its distribution in 34 administrative regions is extremely uneven, with 57.29% being located in North and East China. It also focused on analyzing five influencing factors, namely, topography, regional status, culture and education, social and economic development level, and external contact. Exploring its spatial structure and influencing factors will not only enable a comprehensive understanding of the development context and current situation of 20th-century architectural heritage, but also provide a reference for its protection and sustainable use. Full article
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18 pages, 2914 KiB  
Article
Measuring the Spatial Accessibility of Parks in Wuhan, China, Using a Comprehensive Multimodal 2SFCA Method
by Kainan Mao, Jingzhong Li and Haowen Yan
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2023, 12(9), 357; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi12090357 - 31 Aug 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1368
Abstract
The spatial accessibility of urban parks is an important indicator of the livability level of cities. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive multimodal two-step floating catchment area (CM2SFCA) method which integrates supply capacity, the selection probability of individuals, and variable catchment sizes [...] Read more.
The spatial accessibility of urban parks is an important indicator of the livability level of cities. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive multimodal two-step floating catchment area (CM2SFCA) method which integrates supply capacity, the selection probability of individuals, and variable catchment sizes into the traditional multimodel 2SFCA method. This method is used to measure park accessibility in Wuhan, China. The results show that the spatial distribution of park accessibility under the proposed method is variant. High accessibility areas are clustered near the Third Ring Road with strong supply capacity parks, and low accessibility areas are distributed in the western and southern regions. Compared with the single-model accessibility (bicycling, driving, and public transit) method, we found that the multimodal spatial accessibility, combining the characteristics of three single transportations, can provide a more realistic evaluation. We also explore the spatial relationship between park accessibility and population density by bivariate local Moran’s I statistic and find that the Low Ai-High Pi area is located in the center of the study area, and the Low Ai-Low Pi area is located at the edge of the study area, with a relatively discrete distribution of parks and weak supply capacity. These findings may provide some insights for urban planners to formulate effective policies and strategies to ease the spatial inequity of urban parks. Full article
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