A Systematic Survey of Point Set Distance Measures for Link Discovery

Tracking #: 936-2147

Authors: 
Mohamed Sherif
Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo

Responsible editor: 
Claudia d'Amato

Submission type: 
Survey Article
Abstract: 
With the growth of the Data Web, large amounts of geo-spatial information have been made available. While discovering links between resources on the Data Web has been shown to be a demanding task, discovering links between geo-spatial resources proves to be even more challenging. This is partly due to the resources being described by the means of vector geometry. Especially, discrepancies in granularity and error measurements across datasets render the selection of appropriate distance measures for geo-spatial resources difficult. In this paper, we survey existing literature for point-set measures that can be used to measure the similarity of vector geometries. We then present and evaluate the ten measures that we derived from literature. We evaluate these measures with respect to their time-efficiency and their robustness against discrepancies in measurement and in granularity. To this end, we use samples of real datasets of different granularity as input for our evaluation framework. The results obtained on three different datasets suggest that most distances approaches can be led to scale. Moreover, while some distances are significantly slower than other measures, distances based on means, surjections and sums of minimal distances are robust against the different types of discrepancies.
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Decision/Status: 
Major Revision

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Review #1
Anonymous submitted on 06/Feb/2015
Suggestion:
Major Revision
Review Comment:

(1) Suitability as introductory text, targeted at researchers, PhD students, or practitioners, to get started on the covered topic.

This paper presents and analyses ten set point measures that can be employed for link discovery in geographic linked data sets. These measures are extracted from a set of academic papers retrieved from a set of selected Web sources and filtered following particular criteria. The measures are evaluated and compared extensively, also by means of a combination of the selected measures with the ORCHID approach.

The paper is interesting and well written. Nevertheless, I think that some improvements and clarifications are necessary.

My main concern regards a possible confusion regarding the characteristics of the distance measure chosen. In particular, by reading the title, I wonder if the distance measures used, apart for being set point distance measures, do have any specific characteristic that makes them suitable for link discovery. This doubt is further reinforced by the choice of the sources when looking for distance measures: the authors make use of either generalist or linked data/semantic web sources.
If I understood it correctly, the only constraint regards the fact that the measure has to fit the representation adopted by the dataset (e.g., point set), and the fact that they are actually employed in other papers to this extent. However, I would emphasise this aspect or, otherwise, I would enlist the peculiar characteristics that such a measure should have.

Moreover, the authors say: “On the Web of Data, the geo-spatial location of resources is most commonly described using either points or more generally by means of vector geometry” and “geo-spatial resources are commonly described by means of vector geometry". What does “most commonly” exactly mean? Would it be possible to have a more precise quantification of the diffusion of these representations? For completeness, which representation method do the other sources use?

As hinted before, this work bridges two different areas, that is linked data and geography/geometry. It is clear this is seen from the Linked Data point of view, since the ultimate goal of the work here described is to make link prediction in Linked Data sets. However, intuitively I would guess that some distance measures are defined also in papers from the geography or geometry field. Therefore, I wonder if it is possible to extend the sources selection for procedure of Section 3 in order to comprise this category of sources as well (after all, some of these sources will be searched through the generalist sources chosen). Again, if this is not possible, I would motivate why. In the introduction the authors say: “In this paper, we survey existing literature for point-set measures that can be used to measure the similarity of vector geometries.”, so following this sentence, any point-set measure should be considered in this survey.

I think that the procedure adopted for identifying the distance measures is an interesting contribution per se. It is not evaluated (in terms of precision and recall) but still, I would highlight it as an indirect contribution to be further refined/validated in the future. Since this kind of papers is aimed at PhD students and novices, I believe that they could benefit from this methodological contribution.

Lastly, would it be possible to make the code developed for the experiments available?

(2) How comprehensive and how balanced is the presentation and coverage.

I think that the topic is covered extensively. The number of measures considered is relevant and the evaluations made are extensive. I only wonder if, by including sources from other domains like the geospatial domain, other useful measures would have emerged.

Minor issue: please, indicate the computational complexity for all the metrics.

(3) Readability and clarity of the presentation.

The paper is clear and well written. However, I would address the following issues:
why repeating the research questions at page 2 and 3? Also, Q5 at page 2 ends with “Geospatial Web Data integration and enrichment”, which looks unrelated to the research question;
likewise, the introduction of section 3 and section 3.2 repeat the same content in unstructured and structured manner. Would it be possible to reduce the overlap?
clarify better the definitions adopted and stick to a given terminology (e.g., ‘Data Web’ vs. ‘Web of Data’, ‘distances’ sometimes used in place of ‘distance measures’).

(4) Importance of the covered material to the broader Semantic Web community.

The material covered in this paper important for the Semantic Web community, in particular in the Linked Data-Geo community.

Review #2
By Michael Guthe submitted on 22/Apr/2015
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

This manuscript was submitted as 'Survey Article' and should be reviewed along the following dimensions: (1) Suitability as introductory text, targeted at researchers, PhD students, or practitioners, to get started on the covered topic. (2) How comprehensive and how balanced is the presentation and coverage. (3) Readability and clarity of the presentation. (4) Importance of the covered material to the broader Semantic Web community.

The paper is well written and presents an extensive survey of dirrefent distance measures for point sets. As point set distances are very relevant to find connections in all kinds of data, the topic is relevant for the Semantic Web community.

Review #3
By Nathalie Abadie submitted on 23/Jun/2015
Suggestion:
Major Revision
Review Comment:

This manuscript was submitted as 'Survey Article' and should be reviewed along the following dimensions: (1) Suitability as introductory text, targeted at researchers, PhD students, or practitioners, to get started on the covered topic. (2) How comprehensive and how balanced is the presentation and coverage. (3) Readability and clarity of the presentation. (4) Importance of the covered material to the broader Semantic Web community.

The article deals with an important yet difficult issue, namely the use of direct spatial references for finding links between geospatial resources. It proposes a survey of 10 point set distance measures found in the scientific literature. The effectiveness of these measures for link discovery between geospatial resources is eventually assessed against a benchmark geographic dataset specifically created for this work. This systematic analysis aims at determining what measure should be preferably used for link discovery between geospatial resources.
The methodology applied for the systematic survey of the literature is clearly presented. The authors give the list of search engines, digital libraries and journals used for finding material on point set distance measures, the keywords applied on them for searching articles as well as the inclusion and exclusion criteria used for filtering the retrieved articles. The resulting list of distance measures is quite significant but seems incomplete: the article only focuses on distances between locations, although other geometrical properties like shape, size or orientation may be used to match geographical features (See for example (Arkin et al., 1991)). Besides, the retrieved distance measures consider geometries as ordered sets of discrete points and exclude distance measures handling geometries as continuous shapes (for example, the minimal distance between a given point and its projection on the exterior ring of a polygon). This is probably due to the use of a too restrictive list of keywords for articles search: why not using “geographical data matching”? The fact that geographical information science journals such as IJGIS, Transactions in GIS or Geoinformatica are not included in the list of surveyed journals is also surprising since this issue of geographical data matching based on vector geometries comparison has been addressed for many years by the geographical information science community. Unfortunately, this leads to a partial overview of the domain.
The article first explains very clearly the need for a direct spatial reference criterion for geospatial resources linking and describes how these direct spatial references are represented by the mean of vector geometries. The vector representation of Malta in 3 different datasets (Nuts, DBPedia and LinkedGeoData) is used to illustrate two common types of discrepancies between geographical datasets, here named measurement discrepancy and discrepancy in granularity by the authors. This shows well how heterogeneities between vector geometries may make link discovery difficult. However, this example provides an incomplete overview of geometrical heterogeneities that commonly occur between geographical datasets. First, it is assumed, although not explicitly stated, that all geometries are defined in the same coordinate reference system, namely WGS84. Besides, there are many types of geometrical heterogeneities caused by different levels of detail between geographic datasets that have been discussed more thoroughly by (Lemarié and Raynal, 1996), (Devogele et al., 1996) or (Devogele et al., 1998). As the list of research questions addressed in this article is based on this unique example of discrepancies, it remains too limited with regards to the announced objective of discussing what measure should be preferably used for geometry-based link discovery in any cases. Indeed, it is most regrettable that the use of different distance measures depending on the type, on the density or on the level of detail of the vector geometries to be compared is neither investigated nor discussed. Moreover, the combined use of several geometrical or topological properties is not covered, although it has been acknowledged as an efficient approach especially for link discovery between linestrings in network matching applications (Walter and Fritsch, 1999) (Lüscher et al., 2007) (Mustière and Devogele, 1998).
The systematic description of the retrieved distance measures in section 4 is quite clear, although the definition given for Hausdorff distance is in fact the oriented Hausdorff distance from S to T. Giving the distance value obtained from each measure on the Malta dataset example is also a good way to illustrate the behavior of each measure. However the value computed for the Fréchet distance seems unlikely with regards to the input geometries. As a matter of fact, when computing the discrete Fréchet distance with the open source GIS platform GeOxygene on WKT geometries described by points ordered in the same way and with the same coordinates as those presented in Fig. 1 for DBpedia and Nuts, I get approximately 34.6 km.
The experiments designed to answer the research questions stated initially are rather clearly presented. Although I agree with the authors on the need for benchmark geographic datasets, I am concerned that the modifiers proposed in this article may generate unrealistic datasets with invalid geometries which could lead to biased conclusions. As I understand how these modifiers work, the points used to describe polygons are discarded or displaced randomly, without any attempt to preserve neither the overall shape nor the topological relations of each original polygon. When applied on datasets representing a partition of space like the Nuts dataset, this may generate a topologically invalid dataset with self-intersecting polygons and sliver polygons. In such conditions, it is not surprising that the Fréchet distance, which is shape sensitive, may appear less robust than the mean distance against granularity and measurement discrepancies. Why not reusing simplification or displacement algorithms proposed in the field of cartographic generalisation for generating datasets with different levels of detail? (See (Regnauld and McMaster, 2007) for an overview of generalisation operators). Or more simply, why not using real datasets with different levels of detail, since Nuts codes could be used as keys for generating a reference link set? In addition, the proposed benchmark dataset, consisting only of polygons and points representing statistical units, seems too limited to draw valid conclusions for all types of geometrical link discovery use cases. For example, how would the presented distance measures behave on line-shaped road networks or on buildings modelled as polygons and points in dense urban areas? How effective would they be on heterogeneous land use classifications represented by polygons and requiring 1:n or n:m links discovery?
Finally, it would have been interesting to discuss the choice of the great-circle distance measure as a basic distance for all the evaluated measures. As a matter of fact, this distance assumes a spherical Earth and generates approximated distance values. Why not using a formula for distance on the ellipsoid as recommended in (Chrisman and Girres, 2013)? Or, assuming that distance errors would not affect link discovery results on a limited area, why not projecting first all data on a plane in order to work on Cartesian coordinates?
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Chrisman, N. and Girres J.-F. (2013). First, do no harm : Eliminating systematic error in analytical results of gis applications. In Proceedings of 8th International Symposium on Spatial Data Quality (ISSDQ'13), 30 May - 2 June 2013, Hong-Kong (China).
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