Theme and proposed topics

Almost all human activity can be regarded as taking place within geographic space and as a consequence there are many types of information that are geographically referenced, in the sense that they refer to somewhere on Earth. Information technology for handling geographic information has been based largely on the highly structured map-based representations of space that are used in most geographical information systems (GIS). Relatively little effort has been expended on developing facilities required to access less structured, textual information, in which geographical context may be given by place names and associated terminology for spatial relationships. Such geographical text is commonly found in web documents, but geographical terms are considered by conventional search engines no differently from other search terms. As a consequence, documents will only be retrieved if they contain exact matches with the geographical terminology in the query expression. Documents that refer to alternative versions of the query place name or to places that are in the vicinity, either nearby or even within the query place, are unlikely to be found. There is a need therefore for specialised geographical information techniques that exhibit geographical intelligence in recognising the presence of place names, and other geographic references, in documents and user queries and provide retrieval facilities that can make imprecise matches between geographical query terms and the contents of documents.

The workshop is intended to cover a wide range of topics that are of particular concern to geographical information retrieval. Examples of topics that are particularly relevant include, but are not confined to:

  • architectures for geographic search engines;
  • spatial indexing of documents and images;
  • extraction of geographical context from documents and geo-datasets;
  • geographical annotation techniques for geo-referenced documents and images;
  • design, construction, maintenance and access methods for geographical ontologies, gazetteers and geographical thesauri;
  • geographical query interfaces for the web and geo-spatial libraries;
  • visualising of the results of geographic searches;
  • relevance ranking for geographical search;
  • web portals to geo-information; and
  • standards for exchange of unstructured or partially-structured geographical information.

     

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