Downsampling, which aims to improve computational efficiency by reducing the spatial resolution of feature maps, is a critical operation in neural networks. Many downsampling methods have been proposed to address the challenge of retaining feature map information. However, some detailed information is still lost, even though these methods can extract features with stronger semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel downsampling method which combines feature slicing and depthwise separable convolution for information-retaining downsampling. It slices the input feature map into multiple non-overlapping sub-feature maps by using indexes with a stride of two in the spatial dimension and applies depthwise separable convolution on each slice to extract feature information. To demonstrate the effectiveness of SliceSamp, we compare it with classical downsampling methods on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks using several benchmark datasets, including ImageNet-1K, COCO, VOC, and ADE20K. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SliceSamp outperforms classical downsampling methods with consistent improvements in various computer vision tasks. The proposed SliceSamp shows advanced model performance with lower computational costs and memory requirements. By replacing the downsampling layers in different network architectures (including ResNet (Residual Network), YOLOv5, and Swin Transformer), SliceSamp brings different degrees of performance gains (+0.54~3.64%) compared to these baseline models. Additionally, SliceUpsamp enables high-resolution feature reconstruction and alignment during upsampling. SliceSamp and SliceUpsamp can be plug-and-play-integrated into existing neural network architectures. As a promising downsampling alternative to traditional methods, SliceSamp can also provide a reference for designing lightweight and high-performance model architectures in the future.

Recent advances in knowledge graphs show great promise to link various data together to provide a semantic network. Place is an important part in the big picture of the knowledge graph since it serves as a powerful glue to link any data to its georeference. A key technical challenge in constructing knowledge graphs with location nodes as geographical references is the matching of place entities. Traditional methods typically rely on rule-based matching or machine-learning techniques to determine if two place names refer to the same location. However, these approaches are often limited in the feature selection of places for matching criteria, resulting in imbalanced consideration of spatial and semantic features. Deep feature-based methods such as deep learning methods show great promise for improved place data conflation. This paper introduces a Semantic-Spatial Aware Representation Learning Model (SSARLM) for Place Matching. SSARLM liberates the tedious manual feature extraction step inherent in traditional methods, enabling an end-to-end place entity matching pipeline. Furthermore, we introduce an embedding fusion module designed for the unified encoding of semantic and spatial information. In the experiment, we evaluate the approach to named places from Guangzhou and Shanghai cities in GeoNames, OpenStreetMap (OSM), and Baidu Map. The SSARLM is compared with several classical and commonly used binary classification machine learning models, and the state-of-the-art large language model, GPT-4. The results demonstrate the benefit of pre-trained models in data conflation of named places.

The Web of Data has been fueled significantly by geospatial data over the last few years. In the current link discovery frameworks, there is still a lack of robust support for finding geospatial-aware links between geospatial data sources in the Web of Data. They are also limited in efficient association capabilities for large-scale datasets. This paper extends the data integration capability based on the spatial metrics in the open geospatial engine OGE. These metrics include topological relationships and spatial matching between geospatial entities within multiple geospatial data sources. Thus, the tool can be employed by data publishers to set geospatial-aware links to facilitate geospatial data and knowledge discovery in the Web of Data. Several geospatial data sources are used to demonstrate the usability and effectiveness of the approach and tool implementation.