iSoLIM: a similarity-based spatial prediction software for the big data era

Spatial prediction software is a valuable tool for predicting the spatial distribution of geographic variables and have a wide applicability with numerous non-expert users. However, as the input data to spatial prediction tasks gets more various in sources and larger in volume in the big data era, existing software are faced with challenges when processing such data on personal computers, which is one of the main platforms for running the software. This study uses the design and implementation of a similarity-based spatial prediction desktop software, the intelligent Soil Land Inference Model (iSoLIM), as an example to enable existing software to easily execute spatial prediction tasks with multi-source and large-volume data. The implemented similarity-based method was originally designed for digital soil mapping and has been applied to many other geographic variables. In the presented software, an expandable knowledge representation schema is adopted to intelligently manage multi-source knowledge data and enable knowledge integration; block division-based parallelization is adopted for intelligent computation arrangement on large-volume data. Experiments attest that, compared to existing software, iSoLIM can achieve higher accuracy from multi-source knowledge data by knowledge integration; and shows higher efficiency when processing data in large volume.