TY - JOUR
T1 - United Arab Emirates (UAE) talking map
AU - Yagoub, M. M.
N1 - Funding Information:
The support for the research presented in this article had been provided by the United Arab Emirate University-Research Affairs (Project No. CHSS/37/2014). The support is gratefully acknowledged. The views and conclusions are those of the author and should not be taken as those of the sponsor. The author would like to acknowledge the efforts made by Mr. Youness Zahir, Vipal Sharma and Ahmad Jalil in data processing and system development. Gratitude is extended to Prof. Scott Madry (University of North Carolina) for his valuable input and editing of the paper. Special thanks are due to the GeoJournal anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions and comments that enhance the article. Last but not least, the effort of the editorial board of the GeoJournal is highly appreciated.
Funding Information:
The support for the research presented in this article had been provided by the United Arab Emirate University-Research Affairs (Project No. CHSS/37/2014). The support is gratefully acknowledged. The views and conclusions are those of the author and should not be taken as those of the sponsor. The author would like to acknowledge the efforts made by Mr. Youness Zahir, Vipal Sharma and Ahmad Jalil in data processing and system development. Gratitude is extended to Prof. Scott Madry (University of North Carolina) for his valuable input and editing of the paper. Special thanks are due to the GeoJournal anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions and comments that enhance the article. Last but not least, the effort of the editorial board of the GeoJournal is highly appreciated.
Funding Information:
The fund for this study was provided by the UAE University Research Council through Project No. CHSS/37/2014.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2019/8/15
Y1 - 2019/8/15
N2 - There is a global market for intelligent maps in areas such as navigation, moving robots, and smart cities. This leads to the rise of new research domains in geography such as navigation ontology and an ontological hierarchy for spatial knowledge. Early navigation maps used only visual descriptions and symbols. Continued developments in hardware, software, data and progress in integration of voice with vehicles (land, marine, air) has made navigation easier and has lead to the reduction of accidents and savings of time and money. However, the majority of navigation systems provide one-way turn-by-turn voice only, where the user is a listener only and cannot give instructions, and this puts constraints and limitations on their use in other applications. The objective of this research is to develop a talking map application that couples Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with speech recognition systems. The research question posed is how to interact with maps via voice? A prototype application is developed for United Arab Emirates that integrates a speech recognition system with GIS software. The application receives a voice message from a sender, decomposes it, and extracts geographical names based on ontological structure and attribute (schema). The application was assessed by a survey to fifty Geography students. 78% of them found the cities/villages they are searching for within a minute through the voice search. However, 22% of them found difficulty in finding cities/villages with complex pronunciation. Diverse users may derive multiple benefits through the use of the methodology and the application developed here.
AB - There is a global market for intelligent maps in areas such as navigation, moving robots, and smart cities. This leads to the rise of new research domains in geography such as navigation ontology and an ontological hierarchy for spatial knowledge. Early navigation maps used only visual descriptions and symbols. Continued developments in hardware, software, data and progress in integration of voice with vehicles (land, marine, air) has made navigation easier and has lead to the reduction of accidents and savings of time and money. However, the majority of navigation systems provide one-way turn-by-turn voice only, where the user is a listener only and cannot give instructions, and this puts constraints and limitations on their use in other applications. The objective of this research is to develop a talking map application that couples Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with speech recognition systems. The research question posed is how to interact with maps via voice? A prototype application is developed for United Arab Emirates that integrates a speech recognition system with GIS software. The application receives a voice message from a sender, decomposes it, and extracts geographical names based on ontological structure and attribute (schema). The application was assessed by a survey to fifty Geography students. 78% of them found the cities/villages they are searching for within a minute through the voice search. However, 22% of them found difficulty in finding cities/villages with complex pronunciation. Diverse users may derive multiple benefits through the use of the methodology and the application developed here.
KW - GIS
KW - Smart services
KW - UAE
KW - Voice maps
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85049123398&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/s10708-018-9896-x
DO - 10.1007/s10708-018-9896-x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85049123398
SN - 0343-2521
VL - 84
SP - 889
EP - 899
JO - Geo Journal
JF - Geo Journal
IS - 4
ER -