An information fusion approach to integrate image annotation and text mining methods for geographic knowledge discovery

Due to the steady increase in the number of heterogeneous types of location information on the internet, it is hard to organize a complete overview of the geospatial information for the tasks of knowledge acquisition related to specific geographic locations. The text- and photo-types of geographical dataset contain numerous location data, such as location-based tourism information, therefore defining high dimensional spaces of attributes that are highly correlated. In this work, we utilized text- and photo-types of location information with a novel approach of information fusion that exploits effective image annotation and location based text-mining approaches to enhance identification of geographic location and spatial cognition. In this paper, we describe our feature extraction methods to annotating images, and utilizing text mining approach to analyze images and texts simultaneously, in order to carry out geospatial text mining and image classification tasks. Subsequently, photo-images and textual documents are projected to a unified feature space, in order to generate a co-constructed semantic space for information fusion. Also, we employed text mining approaches to classify documents into various categories based upon their geospatial features, with the aims to discovering relationships between documents and geographical zones. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively enhance the tasks of location based knowledge discovery.