Spatio-Temporal parsing in spatial hypermedia

Abstract

Since 2011 Thomas Schedel has been working as a research assistant at the Institute of Information Systems (iisys) at Hof University. In 2016 he successfully finished the Ph.D. program "Computer Science and Engineering" (CSE) at Aalborg University in Denmark. In his thesis - supervised by Henrik Legind Larsen (Aalborg University) and Claus Atzenbeck (Institute of Information Systems, Hof University) - he claims that considering temporal aspects in addition to spatial and visual properties in spatial parser design will lead to significant increase in parsing accuracy, detection of richer structures and thus higher parser performance. For the purpose of providing evidence, parsers for recognizing spatial, visual and temporal object relations have been implemented and tested in a series of user surveys. It turned out, that in none of the test cases pure spatial or visual parser could outperform the spatio-temporal parser. Instead, the spatio-temporal parser was able to compensate limitations of conventional parsers. Furthermore, differences in parsing accuracy were successfully tested for statistical significance. The results indicate a non-trivial effect that is recognizable by humans. We have shown that the addition of a temporal parser shifts machine detected structures significantly closer to what knowledge workers intend to express. Due to its significant contributions to the research area of spatial hypermedia the thesis has been awarded with the Informatikpreis 2016 (given by the German Fachbereichstag Informatik, FBTI).