A Language and a Visual Interface to Specify Complex Spatial Patterns

Abstract

The emerging interests in spatial pattern mining lead to the demand for a flexible spatial pattern mining language, on which easy to use and understand visual pattern language could be built. This motivates us to define a pattern mining language called CSPML to allow users to specify complex spatial patterns they are interested in mining from spatial datasets. We describe our proposed pattern mining language in this paper. Unlike general pattern languages proposed in literature, our language is specifically designed for specifying spatial patterns. An interface which allows users to specify the patterns visually is designed. The visual language is based on and goes beyond the visual language proposed in literature in the sense that users use CSPML to retrieve patterns instead of the results of a simple spatial query.