Phenomena-Based Management of Geotime-Tagged Contents on the Web

Recently, Geoweb services help people easily create and share geo-spatiotemporal contents through Internet. As a result, it becomes an emerging issue to manage Geoweb contents in exploding lots of spatiotemporal information and to obtain comprehensive knowledge about the real world using web contents. This paper proposes a novel approach for managing geotime-tagged contents on the basis of moving phenomena, such as typhoons, earthquakes, and flooding. In this study, a moving phenomenon is represented by a predefined three-dimensional object in a spatiotemporal domain with predefined meanings, and we define a phenomena-based predicate template named Relates as a combination of spatial, temporal, and thematic constraints. By using the Relates predicate, we can dynamically aggregate geotime-tagged contents along three aspects: location, time, and topic. Moreover, we present an application of the phenomena-based contents management, called k-Sticker. k-Sticker allows users to find top-k terms related to their own moving phenomenon through a three-dimensional (two spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension) visualization method.