Ross Purves
Abstract
This special issue of SIGSPATIAL Special presents a series of notes describing the state of the art in Geographic Information Retrieval. The notes are intended to provide a review of some of the challenges presented as key research areas in Geographic Information Retrieval [Larson, Jones and Purves], and reflect progress in the field in the intervening years. The challenges as originally set out in [2] were the following:
• detecting geographical references in the form of place names and associated spatial natural language qualifiers within text documents and in users' queries;
• disambiguating place names to determine which particular instance of a name is intended;
• geometric interpretation of the meaning of vague place names, such as the 'Midlands' and of vague spatial language such as 'near';
• indexing documents with respect to their geographic context as well as their non-spatial thematic content;
• ranking the relevance of documents with respect to geography as well as theme;
• developing effective user interfaces that help users to find what they want; and
• developing methods to evaluate the success of GIR.
- Larson, R. 1996. Geographic Information Retrieval and Spatial Browsing. In GIS and Libraries Patrons, Maps and Spatial Information, Smith, L. and Gluck, M. (eds.), Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 81--124.Google Scholar
- Jones, C. B. and Purves, R. S. 2008. Geographical Information Retrieval. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 22(3), 219--228. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Geographic Information Retrieval
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