De nos jours, il est très fréquent de représenter un système en termes de relations entre objets. Parmi les applications les plus courantes de telles données relationnelles, se situent les systèmes de recommandation (RS), qui traitent généralement des relations entre utilisateurs et items à recommander. Les modèles relationnels probabilistes (PRM) sont un bon choix pour la modélisation des dépendances probabilistes entre ces objets. Une tendance croissante dans les systèmes de recommandation est de rajouter une dimension spatiale à ces objets, que ce soient les utilisateurs, ou les items. Cette thèse porte sur l’intersection peu explorée de trois domaines connexes - modèles probabilistes relationnels (et comment apprendre les dépendances probabilistes entre attributs d’une base de données relationnelles), les données spatiales et les systèmes de recommandation. La première contribution de cette thèse porte sur le chevauchement des PRM et des systèmes de recommandation. Nous avons proposé un modèle de recommandation à base de PRM capable de faire des recommandations à partir des requêtes des utilisateurs, mais sans profils d’utilisateurs, traitant ainsi le problème du démarrage à froid. Notre deuxième contribution aborde le problème de l’intégration de l’information spatiale dans un PRM. / Nowadays it is very common to represent a system in terms of relationships between objects. One of the common applications of such relational data is Recommender System (RS), which usually deals with the relationships between users and items. Probabilistic Relational Models (PRMs) can be a good choice for modeling probabilistic dependencies between such objects. A growing trend in recommender systems is to add spatial dimensions to these objects, and make recommendations considering the location of users and/or items. This thesis deals with the (not much explored) intersection of three related fields – Probabilistic Relational Models (a method to learn probabilistic models from relational data), spatial data (often used in relational settings), and recommender systems (which deal with relational data). The first contribution of this thesis deals with the overlapping of PRM and recommender systems. We have proposed a PRM-based personalized recommender system that is capable of making recommendations from user queries in cold-start systems without user profiles. Our second contribution addresses the problem of integrating spatial information into a PRM.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007. / Title from title screen (site viewed Dec. 4, 2007). PDF text: viii, 131 p. : ill., maps ; 16 Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3275077. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Thesis (M.S.S.I.S.)--Regis University, Denver, Colo., 2008. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Feb. 03, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.

The development of a Regional Spatial Data Infrastructure (Regional SDI) is much more challenging than the development of a National SDI initiative within a nation. This is mainly because of the voluntary nature of cooperation at a multi-national level and participation in a Regional SDI initiative. As a result, despite considerable interest and activities, the development of an effective and comprehensive Asia-Pacific Regional Spatial Data Infrastructure (APSDI) is hampered by a lack of support from member nations which results in this initiative remaining only an innovative concept. Based on this situation, the aim of this research is to design an improved conceptual model for Regional SDI and an implementation strategy. It is proposed that this problem can be partly addressed by increasing the level of awareness about the nature and value of SDIs; improving the SDI conceptual model to better meet the needs of nations; and by identifying key factors that facilitate development by better understanding the complexity of the interaction between social, economic and political issues.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / With the development of Internet and the urgent need for GIS (Geographic Information System), XML (eXtensible Markup Language) provides a powerful new way for new web application. This paper makes a research on the application of SVG based on XML in the WebGIS (World Wide Web Geographical Information System). In this paper, the characteristics of XML are illuminated in short; the application of XML in WebGIS is discussed and the features of SVG and its usage with XML are presented; a design of SVG based on XML in the WebGIS system is given.

No description available.

Ever since Halley (1686) superimposed onto a map of land forms. the direction of trade winds and monsoons between and near the tropics and attempted to assign them a physical cause. homo-sapiens has attempted to develop procedures which quantify the level of change in a spatial process. or assess the relationship between associated spatially measured variables. Most spatial data. whether it be originally point. linear or areal in nature. can be converted by a suitable procedure into a continuous form and plotted as an isarithmic map i.e. points of equal height are joined. Once in that form it may be regarded as a statistical surface in which height varies over area in much the same way as the terrain varies on topographic maps. Particularly in environmental statistics. the underlying shape of the surface is unknown. and hence the use of non-parametric techniques is wholly appropriate. For most applications. the location of data points is beyond the control of the map-maker hence the analyst must cope with irregularly spaced data points. A variety of possible techniques for describing a surface are given in chapter two, with attention focusing on the methodology surrounding kernel density estimation. Once a surface has been produced to describe a set of data. a decision concerning the number of contours and how they should be selected has to be taken. When comparing two sets of data. it is imperative that the contours selected are chosen using the same criteria. A data based procedure is developed in chapter three which ensures comparability of the surfaces and hence spurious conclusions are not reached as a result of inconsistencies between surfaces. Contained within this chapter is a discussion of issues which relate to other aspects of how a contour should be drawn to minimise the potential for inaccuracies in the swface fitting methodology. Chapter four focuses on a whole wealth of techniques which are currently available for comparing surfaces. These range from the simplest method of overlaying two maps and visually comparing them to more involved techniques which require intensive numerical computation. It is the formalisation of the former of these techniques which forms the basis of the methodology developed in the following two chapters to discern whether change/association has materialised between variables.One means of quantifying change between two surfaces, represented as a contoured surface, is in terms of the transformation which would be required for the two surfaces to be matched. Mathematically, transformations are described in terms of rotation, translation and scalar change. Chapter five provides a geometrical interpretation of the three transformations in terms of area, perimeter, orientation and the centre of gravity of the contour of interest and their associated properties. Although grid resolution is fundamentally a secondary level of smoothing, this aspect of surface fitting has generally been ignored. However to ensure consistency across surfaces, it is necessary to decide firstly, whether data sets of different sizes should be depicted using different mesh resolutions and secondly, how fine a resolution provides optimal results, both in terms of execution time and inherent surface variability. This aspect is examined with particular reference to the geometric descriptors used to quantify change. The question of random noise contained within a measurement process has been ignored in the analysis to this point. However in practice, some form of noise will always be contained within a process. Quantifying the level of noise attributable to a process can prove difficult since the scientist may be over optimistic in his evaluation of the noise level. In developing a suitable set of test statistics, four situations were examined, firstly when no noise was present and then for three levels of noise, the upper bounds of which were 5, 15 and 25%. Based on these statistics, a series of hypothesis tests were developed to look at the question of change for individual contour levels Le. local analysis. or alternatively for a whole surface by combining the statistics and effectively performing a multivariate test. A number of problems are associated with the methodology. These difficulties are discussed and various remedial measures are proposed. The theoretical derivation of the test statistic, both in the absence and presence of random noise, has proved mathematically to be extremely complex, with a number of stringent assumptions required to enable the theoretical distribution to be derived. A major simulation study was subsequently undertaken to develop the empirical probability distribution function for the various statistics defining change for the four levels of noise. Also for each of the statistics, the resultant power of the test was examined.The remaining chapter explicitly examines two case studies and how the methodology developed in the preceding two chapters may be implemented. The first example cited raises the question, 'Has a seasonal temperature change resulted during the fifty year span, 1930 to 1980, within the contiguous United States of America?' The data base was provided by the United States Historical Climatology Network (HCN) Serial Temperature and Precipitation Data, Quinlan et al (1987). The second problem examines whether there is an association between background radiation levels, within three regions of the south-west England, and the location of various fonns of leukaemia or whether case location is a product of the population distribution. Differences between this example and the previous illustration materialise in terms of the spatial resolution of the data; the leukaemia data are defined as punctual data points and are extremely sparse; the population distribution is defined as areal regions; with the radiation data being of a more continuous format. The methodology developed required modification, but aside of this a preliminary set of conclusions were reached.

No description available.

This work discusses alternative methods to detect outliers in spatial point patterns. Outliers are defined based on location only and also with respect to associated variables. Throughout the thesis we discuss five case studies, three of them come from experiments with spiders and bees, and the other two are data from earthquakes in a certain region. One of the main conclusions is that when detecting outliers from the point of view of location we need to take into consideration both the degree of clustering of the events and the context of the study. When detecting outliers from the point of view of an associated variable, outliers can be identified from a global or local perspective. For global outliers, one of the main questions addressed is whether the outliers tend to be clustered or randomly distributed in the region. All the work was done using the R programming language.

In this thesis, we propose mechanisms to extend the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. In-network data aggregation is considered on both tree-based and flow-based routing protocols during the process of data collection to reduce redundant transmissions. In the flow-based data collection design, we introduce the concept of flow loss multiplier to express the impact of data aggregation over correlated data. The application has the freedom to set the flow loss multiplier to reflect its specific knowledge of correlation. We also introduce traffic balancing as a complementary technique to data aggregation. It helps avoid exhausting the energy of any sensor node while leaving large amounts of energy at other nodes. In tree-based data collection schemes, we adjust the tree structure judiciously to balance energy consumption before any node's failure due to total residual energy depletion. In flow-based schemes, after aggregation, data flows are split and the fragments are spread to increase network lifetime. We investigate the impact of performing greedily data aggregation at the "best" aggregation site regardless of its location, the results of our analysis show that only applying 2-way data aggregation may limit the ability to explore more complex aggregation possibilities. To address this problem, we propose an aggressive data aggregation for a specified application, contour map reconstruction. Based on the simulation results, our aggregation scheme is shown to be able to eliminate large volume of contour data and retain satisfying data accuracy.