Fundamental Research of System for Extracting Attributes of Digital Map by Automatic Search on WWW

Abstract

Recently, due to the development of information technology, importance of spatial information has been increasing significantly. Everyone is now able to acquire positional information easily, and spatial information has become indispensable in our daily life. Recently, services for spatial information have been increasing. People are able to use these services using a personal computer or a mobile phone. In order to further develop these services, maintenance of spatial information is essential. Spatial information is composed of geometric information and attribute information. By the development of information processing technology, 3D expression of geometric information has been made possible. Most real-life-like digital maps have been constructed by the use of 3D technology. However, maintenance of attribute information is still undeveloped. For example, on digital maps that are available on the Web and on publication of the Geographical Survey Institute, there are a lot of cases where only minimum attribute information such as building name, address, and telephone number is maintained. With this current situation, sufficient information will not be able to be offered to the expanding demands for services of spatial information in the future. For example, in the case of searching for arch bridges that spans across river, if detailed attribute information such as Yodo river and arch bridge is not maintained in the digital map, the search will not be possible. Also, in the case of using GIS for disaster prevention, city planning, and barrier free transportation, detailed attribute information is necessary. New information is in constant demand for attribute information. For providing accurate spatial information services, spatial information continuously requires to be in a state that corresponds to the real world. For this reason, attribute information needs to be frequently updated and maintained. Currently, maintaining attribute information requires great deal of cost and labor. Therefore, development of a system for easily maintaining attribute information is in demand. Hence, this research attempts to realize automatic extraction of attribute information on digital maps. Abstract: A service for providing spatial information is recently increasing. This service is easily used by a personal computer or a mobile phone. It is important that a digital map has a lot of attributes on the spatial service. However, making attributes of digital maps requires a great deal of time and money. Therefore, it is difficult to define attributes of spatial data and to produce these values. The purpose of this research is to develop a system that can automatically produce and update attributes of the digital map by searching on Web pages. Moreover, a function for searching spatial information with a keyword of natural language is implemented.