Creating Spatiotemporal Semantic Maps from Web Text Documents - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 159

Fig. 10.2 Algorithm for combining extracted spatiotemporal information from text documents

date in the headline of each news article is assigned to spatial locations mentioned
in the article, providing some temporal information. All temporal information needs
to be converted to standard time format (i.e., 08/06/2012) for further processing.
When combining spatiotemporal information, additional processing is undertaken
to manage temporal information. For example, the published date of news reports
serves as a criterion to compare other temporal expressions in the document so that
these expressions may be correctly ordered.
All results are exported in a database that includes a set of tuples f S ID ,S E ,S G ,
X, Y, T g , where (1) S ID is the id number of S E (a spatial term) - GATE marks each
annotated term with a specific ID number after the results are sorted. The spatial
terms can be mapped based on their ID number that determines the order of positions
according to where spatial terms occur in text documents; (2) S E corresponds to
the spatial term; (3) S G describes spatial granularity of the spatial term (e.g., city,
state, or county name); (4) X and Y represent x,y coordinates for the location of the
term S E ;and(5) T refers to the associated temporal information (e.g., 08/09/2012).
After all records are stored in ArcGIS, the locations are mapped with an x,y display
function.