ITR: Framework for Integrating Geospatial and Online Data to Respond to Unexpected Events

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Much of the work on information integration has focused on the dynamic integration of structured data sources, such as databases or XML data. With more complex geospatial data types, such as satellite imagery, maps, and vector data, researchers have focused on limited types of integration, such as combining vector data with imagery. With the enormous amount of geospatial data now available and the huge amount of data available on the Web, there is a terrific opportunity to exploit the integration of these two types of information sources. We plan to address this challenge by developing a general framework for integrating online and geospatial data sources. The resulting framework will support general operations for processing and joining the various source types, query processing that integrates data over a wide range of source types, and optimization techniques that manage the tradeoffs between accuracy and efficiency. The overall project will provide a significant advance in the ability to rapidly integrate and exploit the wide variety of geospatial and online sources that are available today. This research will be conducted as part of University of Southern California's Center for Research on Unexpected Events and will greatly improve our nation's ability to respond to unexpected events.