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In this paper, we propose a Geographic Information Mining framework to contribute some exploratory results concerning harvesting the featured place information entities from the Web. In the framework, we suggest an iterative geographic information mining model reflecting the data evolution along the mining process. Associating the iterations, we propose a set of methodologies and integrate them into the processing onto solving the critical issues concerning collecting data, filtering irrelevant samples and extracting featured entities. According to the experiments, the contribution brings in a sound systematic solution to enrich the existing digital gazetteers as complete as Google Maps.

Electric Vehicles (EVs) have grown in recent years as they have become a promising alternative to traditional fossil fuel-driven vehicles. As a result, new routing algorithms that consider both the locations of charging stations and the charging preferences of users are necessary to maintain urban traffic efficiency. This paper proposes a Constrained Route Planning (CRP) approach, called BiS4EV, to provide efficient route planning for EVs in large urban road networks. CRP is an NP-hard problem. BiS4EV introduces a two-layered structure to solve the CRP problem for EVs. In the first layer, BiS4EV integrates the locations of charging stations and the battery consumption on each road arc into a road network graph and proposes a fast routing algorithm that considers the constraints of battery capacity and charging preferences to find the shortest feasible path for EVs. The second layer incorporates charging policies to the obtained path, which forms a complete route plan for EVs. Such a two-layered method breaks down the complexity of the problem and avoids directly solving the entire NP-hard problem. We have proved the correctness of the proposed approach in theory, and the presented experimental results verified the efficiency and the effectiveness of BiS4EV from the practical aspect.

Converting geographic features (e.g., place names) in map images into a vector format is the first step for incorporating cartographic information into a geographic information system (GIS). With the advancement in computational power and algorithm design, map processing systems have been considerably improved over the last decade. However, the fundamental map processing techniques such as color image segmentation, (map) layer separation, and object recognition are sensitive to minor variations in graphical properties of the input image (e.g., scanning resolution). As a result, most map processing results would not meet user expectations if the user does not "properly" scan the map of interest, pre-process the map image (e.g., using compression or not), and train the processing system, accordingly. These issues could slow down the further advancement of map processing techniques as such unsuccessful attempts create a discouraged user community, and less sophisticated tools would be perceived as more viable solutions. Thus, it is important to understand what kinds of maps are suitable for automatic map processing and what types of results and process-related errors can be expected. In this paper, we shed light on these questions by using a typical map processing task, text recognition, to discuss a number of map instances that vary in suitability for automatic processing. We also present an extensive experiment on a diverse set of scanned historical maps to provide measures of baseline performance of a standard text recognition tool under varying map conditions (graphical quality) and text representations (that can vary even within the same map sheet). Our experimental results help the user understand what to expect when a fully or semi-automatic map processing system is used to process a scanned map with certain (varying) graphical properties and complexities in map content. We discuss the impact of graphical quality on automatic map processing.We include a comprehensive experiment covering a wide range of map products.We report our findings on the tested map products under varying image resolutions.