Identifying the geographical scope of prohibition signs

Abstract

Prohibition signs warn of actions considered dangerous or annoying. Typically, these signs are located near the beginning of their scope, but knowledge about applicable prohibitions is important at any place within the scope.We developed an automated method to determine the scope of signs, aiming to support volunteered geographic information (VGI) applications that wish to capture prohibitions. In this paper we investigate the problem of computing the scope of geo-referenced signs that refer to human outdoor activities using OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. We analyze the problem and discuss the specific challenges faced. From the analysis we derive a symbolic representation that links activities with (OSM) map features, enabling semantic assessment of map features with respect to a prohibition and reasoning to infer its scope. In a comparative evaluation we demonstrate that our spatial-semantic approach significantly outperforms a previous method based on proximity.