… or Inferring Identity from Observations
Let’s assume the following application:
A conservation organisation starts a project to geographically catalogue the remaining representatives of an endangered plant species. For that purpose hikers are encouraged to communicate the location of the plant if they encounter it. Due to those hikers using GPS technology ranging from cheap smartphones to highend GPS devices and weather as well as environmental circumstances the measurements are of varying accuracy. The goal of the conservation organisation is to build up a map locating all found plants with an ID assigned to them. Now every time a new location measurement is entered into the system a clustering is applied to identify related measurements – i.e. belonging to the same plant.