Change Detection of Geographic Features Based on Web Pages

Geographic features change detection has became a vital component of the national geographical information 12th Five-Year-Plan and the national geographic general survey. In web pages, billions of geographic feature changes were contained, especially in government official websites, news homepages, social portals and etc. The web pages of these websites update frequently, which could provide the latest data for geographic information change detection. Considering the complex characteristics of the web geographic information description,this paper did some valuable achievements. First of all, the geographic information knowledge base was established by summarizing the geographic information words and phrases, which could give the great supports to geographic information semantics change detection. Then, the web geographic information was obtained using two kinds of web crawler technologies. Combining the Google Custom Search crawler and general topic crawler,the web geographic information obtainment could be more complete in both scope and depth. Thirdly, the geographic information was parsed and extracted from the web text, which showed users the related features, place names, times and attributes. Last but not least, the prototype system was finally developed and the results were analyzed. The experiments indicated that the accuracy of related web pages obtainment and features change detection were over 74% and 70% respectively. In addition, the results of geographic information change detection highly relied on the integrity of knowledge base, which need to be completed further. Moreover, the uncertainty and fuzziness of web geographic information also limited the change detection results. Therefore, the web page based geographic information change detection could be a supplementary method of geographic information change detection. Combining the traditional surveying detection and remote-sensing imagery detection methods,it could solve the problems of continuous updating and timely updating of geographic information efficiently.