Integrating Web Data and Geographic Knowledge into Spatial Databases

With the phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web, rich data sources on many different subjects have become available online. Some of these sources store daily facts that often involve textual geographic descriptions. These descriptions can be perceived as indirectly georeferenced data – for example, addresses, telephone numbers, zip codes and place names. In this chapter we focus on using the Web as an important source of urban geographic information and propose to enhance urban Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using indirectly georeferenced data extracted Alberto H.F. Laender, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil Karla A.V. Borges, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil & PRODABEL, Brazil Joyce C.P. Carvalho, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil Claudia B. Medeiros, University of Campinas, Brazil Altigran S. da Silva, Federal University of Amazonas, Brazil Clodoveu A. Davis Jr., PRODABEL, Brazil & Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil This chapter appears in the book Spatial Databases: Technologies, Techniques and Trends by Yannis Manalopoulos, Apostolos Papadopoulos and Michael Gr. Vassilakopoulos. C pyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Suite 200, Hershey PA 17033-1240, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.idea-group.com IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING 24 Laender, Borges, Carvalho, Medeiros, da Silva & Davis Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. from the Web. We describe an environment that allows the extraction of geospatial data from Web pages, converts them to XML format and uploads the converted data into spatial databases for later use in urban GIS. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by a real urban GIS application that uses street addresses as the basis for integrating data from different Web sources, combining the data with high-resolution imagery.