Towards Geo-Fuzzy Sets Analysis
Romain Vuillemot, Liqun Liu, Theo Jaunet
Reasoning over spatial regions is frequent in everyday life. For instance, when moving to a new city, one may want to pick a locations based on its reachability by bus or at a walking distance to school and workplace. Geo-sets—spatial regions plus a category—are well suited to support picking such consensual locations: overlaps of two (or more) sets indicate places that match preferences (e. g., reachable by bus or close to schools). Figure 1 illustrates such sets intersections based on the transportation modality: flying like a bird, walking, or taking the bus. Those intersections may be complex especially as public transports distort time and space, resulting in blob-like shapes and fragmented areas. Also, as regions may be highly variable (e. g., bus timetables vary over the day, walking distance is approximate) their shape may expand or shrink over time (Figure 2). We refer to those changes using the umbrella term variability that may interchangeably capture time-varying parameters or uncertainty.