Events Calendar

PhD Thesis Proposal - Basel Shbita

Title:
Automatic Semantic Spatio-Temporal Interpretation of Historical Maps

Committee:
Craig A. Knoblock (chair), Cyrus Shahabi, John P. Wilson, Jay Pujara, Yao-Yi Chiang

Date:
Friday, February 17th, 1:30pm-3pm PST

Zoom Meeting Details:
https://usc.zoom.us/j/97387539087?pwd=MWEwaHR0Z0FCOEdwdGdEcWxFSnorZz09
Meeting ID: 973 8753 9087
Passcode: 312501

Abstract:
Historical maps provide rich information for researchers in many areas, including the natural and social sciences. These maps include detailed documentation of a wide variety of natural and human-made features, their spatial extent, their changes over time, their geo-names, and additional metadata. Analyzing map collections that cover the same region at different points in time can be labor-intensive even for a scientist, often requiring further grounding and linking with external sources to contextualize the data. With rapidly increasing amounts of digitized map archives, we require methods to convert these maps into a machine-processable and machine-readable semantic form and do so automatically, efficiently, and at scale. Unfortunately, existing techniques are limited and do not leverage the vast landscape of information extracted from archives of historical maps.
In this thesis proposal, we investigate how to convert the extracted geo-data and metadata to a dynamic knowledge graph representation that captures the data semantics, how the data can be interrelated across entire datasets, and how it can be grounded to real-world phenomena by leveraging external resources on the web. We explore approaches that benefit from the open and connective nature of linked data that can produce a spatio-temporal, semantic, and contextualized output that follows linked data principles, and that can be easily extended with further availability of contemporary maps while supporting backward compatible access. Once materialized in a dynamic knowledge graph, the output can hold the data in a semantic network, making it readily shared, accessible, visualized, standardized across domains, and scalable for effortless use by downstream tasks for analysis and expressive integration over time and space.

WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97387539087?pwd=MWEwaHR0Z0FCOEdwdGdEcWxFSnorZz09

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Asiroh Cham