BEIRA: An Area-based User Interface for Map Services
This paper introduces BEIRA, an area-based map user interface for location-based contents. Recently, various web map services are widely used to search for location-based contents. However, browsing a large number of contents that are arranged on a map as points may be troublesome. We tackle this issue by using area-based representations instead of points. AOI (Area of Interest), which is core concept of BEIRA, is an arbitrary shaped area boundary with text summary information. With AOI, users can instantly grasp area characteristics without examining each point. AOI is deduced by performing geo-semantic co-clustering of location-based contents. Geo-semantic co-clustering takes both geographic and semantic features of contents into account. We confirm that the ratio of the geo-semantic blend is the key to deducing an appropriate boundary. We further propose and evaluate location-aware term weighting to obtain an informative summary.
co-clustering map interface web mining geographic information system