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 to 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. In recent years a variety of work has looked at the potential of indexing and retrieving unstructured text from the web using geospatial location. A number of examples of geographically oriented search engines exist, and the growth of services based around location provides further impetus for attempts to develop geographical information retrieval. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together the growing community of researchers and practitioners working in the field of geographic information retrieval to discuss progress within the field and discuss future research strands. 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;
• design, construction, maintenance and access methods for geographical ontologies, gazetteers and geographical thesauri;
• geographical query interfaces for the web and geospatial 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.

We invite contributions from all those engaged in developing geographical information retrieval. Presented papers will take the form of either short (15 minutes) or long papers (30 minutes) with ample time for discussion.

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