TY - GEN
T1 - Leveraging advances in natural language processing to better understand tobler's first law of geography
AU - Li, Toby Jia Jun
AU - Sen, Shilad
AU - Hecht, Brent
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright 2014 ACM.
PY - 2014/11/4
Y1 - 2014/11/4
N2 - Tobler's First Law of Geography (TFL) is one of the key reasons why "spatial is special". The law, which states that "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things", is central to the management, presentation, and analysis of geographic information. However, despite the importance of TFL, we have a limited general understanding of its domain-neutral properties. In this paper, we leverage recent advances in the natural language processing domain of semantic relatedness estimation to, for the first time, robustly evaluate the extent to which relatedness between spatial entities decreases over distance in a domain-neutral fashion. Our results reveal that, in general, TFL can indeed be considered a globally recognized domain-neutral property of geographic information but that there is a distance beyond which being nearer, on average, no longer means being more related.
AB - Tobler's First Law of Geography (TFL) is one of the key reasons why "spatial is special". The law, which states that "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things", is central to the management, presentation, and analysis of geographic information. However, despite the importance of TFL, we have a limited general understanding of its domain-neutral properties. In this paper, we leverage recent advances in the natural language processing domain of semantic relatedness estimation to, for the first time, robustly evaluate the extent to which relatedness between spatial entities decreases over distance in a domain-neutral fashion. Our results reveal that, in general, TFL can indeed be considered a globally recognized domain-neutral property of geographic information but that there is a distance beyond which being nearer, on average, no longer means being more related.
KW - Distance
KW - Semantic relatedness
KW - Tobler's First Law of Geography
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84961204002&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84961204002&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2666310.2666493
DO - 10.1145/2666310.2666493
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84961204002
T3 - GIS: Proceedings of the ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
SP - 513
EP - 516
BT - 22nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2014
A2 - Schneider, Markus
A2 - Gertz, Michael
A2 - Huang, Yan
A2 - Sankaranarayanan, Jagan
A2 - Krumm, John
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 22nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2014
Y2 - 4 November 2014 through 7 November 2014
ER -