Abstract:

Considering the fact that most of the place names in the gazetteer record the spatial information only in the form of center coordinates,which lacks the description of the specific spatial extent of the place name,one-sidedness and limitations exist in the toponym information retrieval. Based on the fully analysis of the place names,spatial attributes and spatial relations,the paper proposes a weighted Voronoi diagram-based retrieval approach for point-like toponym information,which considers the importance of different properties of the place names belonging to the same type in the information retrieval,and takes advantage of the weighted Voronoi diagram in the boundary approximation of the place. The approach constructed weighted Voronoi diagram based on the area properties of the same type place names,and approximated the spatial extent of the place. Then,spatial relation between two places could be described,and the spatial similarity was achieved by the given equations to calculate the similarities of the topological,directional and distance relationship. The approach was verified by approximating boundaries of administrative divisions and retrieving their information. The experiment results show that the approach can be better applied in the approximation of spatial extents and relations of place names,and the spatial similarity matching between query words and geographical information resources can be improved. Finally,the proposed approach is better than the traditional approaches.

Key words: weighted Voronoi diagram, toponym information retrieval, place name, boundary approximation, spatial relation similarity