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›› 2009, Vol. 24 ›› Issue (6): 1109-1124.

• Distributed Computing and Systems •

### Approximating Geographical Queries

Arianna D'Ulizia1, Fernando Ferri1, Anna Formica2, and Patrizia Grifoni1

1. 1Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies, National Research Council, Rome, 00185, Italy
2Institute for System Analysis and Computer Science, National Research Council, Rome, 00185, Italy
• Received:2009-01-12 Revised:2009-07-22 Online:2009-11-05 Published:2009-11-05
• About author:
Arianna D'Ulizia received the M.S. degree in computer science engineering from the University of Rome "La Sapienza'' in 2005 and the Ph.D. degree in computer science and automation from the "Roma Tre'' University in 2009. She is currently a researcher at the Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies of the National Research Council of Italy. She is the author of more than 25 papers on international conferences and books. She is mainly interested in human computer interaction, multimodal interaction, visual languages, geographical query languages, risk governance, and knowledge management in virtual communities.
Fernando Ferri received the M.S. degree in electronics engineering in 1990 and the Ph.D. degree in medical informatics in 1993 both from the University of Rome "La Sapienza''. He is a senior researcher at the National Research Council of Italy since 2001. From 1996 to 2001 he was a researcher at the National Research Council of Italy. From 1993 to 2000 he was a professor of "Sistemi di Elaborazione'' at the University of Macerata. He is the author of more than 120 papers in international journals, books and conferences. He was responsible for several projects funded by Italian Ministry of University and Research and European Commission. His main methodological areas of interest are: human-computer interaction, visual languages, visual interfaces, sketch-based interfaces, and multimodal interfaces and languages, data and knowledge bases, geographic information systems, Web technologies, social networks and risk governance.
Anna Formica received the full-honors M.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza'' in 1989. Currently, she is a researcher at the Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi ed Informatica (IASI) "Antonio Ruberti'' of the Italian National Research Council, Rome, where she works with the Information Systems and Knowledge Bases group, and the Laboratory for Enterprise Knowledge and Systems (LEKS). She serves as referee of several international journals and conferences and she took part in various research projects of the European Framework Programs and bilateral projects with international institutions. Her current research interests are Semantic Web, similarity reasoning, formal specification and validation of domain ontologies.
Patrizia Grifoni received the M.S. degree in electronics engineering in 1990. From 1994 to 2000 she was a professor of "Elaborazione digitale delle immagini'' at the University of Macerata. She is a researcher at the National Research Council of Italy since 1993. She is the author of more than 80 papers in international journals, books and conferences. She was responsible for several projects funded by Italian and International Institutions. Her scientific interests have evolved from query languages for statistical and geographic databases to the focal topics related to human-computer interaction, multimodal interaction and languages, visual languages, visual interfaces, sketch-based interfaces, Web technologies, social networks and risk governance.

This article proposes a graph-theoretic methodology for query approximation in Geographic Information Systems, enabling the relaxation of three kinds of query constraints: topological, semantic and structural. An approximate query is associated with a value corresponding to the degree of similarity with the original query. Such a value is computed for topological constraints on the basis of the topological distance between configurations, for semantic constraints using the information content approach, and for structural constraints revisiting the maximum weighted matching problem in bipartite graphs. Finally, the high correlation of our proposal with human judgment is demonstrated by an experiment.

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