Code and data for place hierarchies

The code and data are related to the paper Combining hierarchies for spatial reasoning of hierarchical relations among places in different contexts.

Abstract: Spatial reasoning of hierarchical relations is an important research topic in geographic information science. Existing literature focuses mainly on hierarchical relations according to ordered containment of point sets based on the 9-Intersection Model (9IM). However, in natural language descriptions, hierarchical relations expressed by prepositions such as in can have spatial configurations conflicting with those hierarchical relations based on 9IM. This paper proposes an algorithm employing combined hierarchies to infer hierarchical relations among places in different contexts. Two graph databases containing combined hierarchies conforming to administrative reach and geometric enclosure are established with places represented by polygons with misaligned boundaries on prototypical and real data. The 13170 pairs of conflicting hierarchical relations with same start nodes but different end nodes detected in the combined hierarchies on real data validate the proposed algorithm for spatial reasoning of hierarchical relations in different contexts. This research facilitates consistent spatial reasoning of hierarchical relations in different contexts for spatial information retrieval and question answering.

File descriptions:

The instructions.md file specifies the steps to use other files.

The createcontainlist_phy_publish.ipynb file is the code to derive hierarchical relations conforming to administrative reach and geometic enclosure.

The db.dump file is the back up of the graph database of global administrative units in neo4j desktop.

The neo4j.dump file is the back up of the graph database of prototypical data in neo4j desktop.