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Friday, December 21, 2007

Geographic Information System (GIS)


Geographic Information System (GIS)
A GIS is a computer based system for capturing, storing, checking,
integrating, manipulating, and displaying data using digitized maps.
GIS has many applications.
 GIS Software
GIS software varies in capabilities from simple computerized mapping
system to enterprise wide DSS tools for decision support data analysis.
A high quality graphic display and fast computation and search speeds
are necessary.
Many early GIS development were at universities and government and
military agencies.
 GIS Data
The Census Bureau publishes a list of topologically integrated
Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) standard format, file
related product.
An alternative standard format, the Digital line Graph (DLG), was
developed by the US Geological Survey.
 GIS and Decision Making
There are countless applications of GIS. Some of them as follow.
The dispatch of emergency vehicles, transit management, facility; site
selection, and wildlife management
Popular applications include political campaign support, consumer
marketing and sales support, sales and territory analysis, site selection,
fleet management, route planning, disaster planning, and regularity
compliance,.
The success of GIS is highly depended on good information. GIS are
proving to be a significant tactical tool for identifying product riches by
geography, facilitating presentations, improving comprehension,
identifying logistical problems, and developing marketing strategies.
 Emerging GIS Applications
The integration of GIS and global positioning satellites (GPS) will
transform the aviation and shipping industries.
It enables vehicles or aircraft equipped with a GPS receiver to pinpoint
their locations as the move.
Emerging applications of GPS include personal automobile mapping
systems, railroad car tracking and earth moving equipment tracking.
Object linking and embedding (OLE) will allow users to import maps
into any document.
 Natural Language Processing: An Overview
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an applied artificial intelligence
technology.
It refers to communicating with a computer in English or whatever
language you speak.
To understand a natural language inquiry, a computer must have
knowledge to analyze and interpret the input.
This knowledge may include linguistic knowledge abut words, domain
knowledge, common sense knowledge and even knowledge about the
users and their goals.
NLP must understand grammar and the definitions of words.
NLP is an attempt to allow computers to interpret normal statement
expressed in a natural human language, such as English or Japanese.
The process of speech recognition, in contrast, attempts to translate
the human voice into individual words and sentences understandable
by the computer.
 Natural Language Processing : Methods
With NLP, the computer’s understanding of human statements may or
may not be translated into a program.
The most advanced fourth generation languages today use the early
results of NLP research, but their abilities are still quite limited
comported with the ultimate goals of NLP.
Currently two major techniques are used in NLP programs.
1. Key word search (Pattern matching)
2. Language processing (Syntactic and semantic analysis)
 Key word analysis (Pattern Matching)
In the pattern matching process, the NLP program searches through an
input sentence looking for selected key words or phrases.
Once a key work is recognized, the program activates a specific
canned response.
 Language Processing (Syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis)
The most obvious and straightforward approach to the problem is to
perform a detailed analysis of the syntax and semantics of an input
statement.
An NLP can determine the meaning of the user’s query through
question such as "Do you mean to say that.
 The procedures : How language processing works
The five major elements are …
1) The Parser This is the key element in NLP
It is software that syntactically analyses the input
sentence.
Each word is identified & its part of speech clarified.
The parser then maps the words into a structure called a
parse tree.
The parse tree shows the meanings of all the works &
how they are assembled.
2) The Lexicon The parser needs a directory called the Lexicon.
The lexicon contains all of the words that the program is
capable of recognizing.
o The parser and the lexicon work together to pick apart a sentence and then
create a parse tree.
o Once a parse tree has been constructed, the system is ready for semantic
analysis to obtain further meaning.
o Semantic analysis is the function of the Understander block.
3) The Understander This works in conjunction with the knowledge base to
determine what the sentence means.
The Understander creates another data structure that
represents the meaning and understanding of the
sentence and stores it in memory.
4) The Generator The above data structure, called a generator, can be used
to initiate addition action.
In its simplest form, the generator feeds standard
presorted output responses to the user based on the
meaning extracted from the input.

5) The knowledge base
 Application of NLP and Software
NLP programs have been applied in several areas. The most important
are as follows.
Interfaces to databases and other software Grammar analysis
Abstracting and summarizing text Composing letters
Knowledge elicitation and machine learning Speech understanding
Translation of a natural language to another
natural language
EX _ English to German
Translation of a computer language to
another computer language
EX _ Fortran to C, the Unix command
f2c

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