Multi-Sketch Alignment in the Context of Volunteered Geographic Information

Sketch maps are an intuitive way of expressing geospatial information. They contain objects which represent real world geographic features, relations between these objects, and oftentimes symbolic and textual annotations (Blaser, 1998). These elements enable us to use sketch maps to communicate about our environments and to reason about our actions in those environments. In this way sketch maps provide an intuitive user interaction modality for some geospatial computer applications (Egenhofer, 1998). Especially with the advent of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) (Goodchild, 2007) sketch maps may be the key to removing the barriers imposed by the technical requirements of traditional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (Schwering, 2010). In order to allow users to contribute and query geographic information using sketch maps an automated system must be able to analyze them and ground them in the real world (Wallgrün, 2010). Some sketch based geospatial query systems achieve this by extracting the spatial relations between objects in the sketch map and searching the database for a set of objects that share matching or similar relations. Two examples of this approach are Spatial-Query-By-Sketch (SQBS) (Egenhofer, 1998) and Qualitative Matching (Wallgrün, 2010) which I will refer to as QM in this paper.

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