Towards ontological similarity for spatial hierarchies
Raimundo F. Dos Santos, Arnold P. Boedihardjo, Chang‐Tien Lu · 2012
Ontological structures provide a rich hierarchy of concepts and relationships that are helpful in exploratory analysis. Ontologies, however, are often categorical, which introduces ambiguity, and makes numerical analysis difficult. Adding to the problem is the fact that as the number of ontological concepts increases so does computational complexity for a variety of analytical tasks. In this paper, we propose both spatial and ontological co-occurrence as a means to derive similarity among categorical values. More specifically, we devise a method that combines entity location as well as categorical frequency into a numerical measure of similarity for any pair of categorical values. In addition, we show how different ontological levels can hide or uncover information content while influencing the number of processed categorical values. We provide experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.