With the growth of the World Wide Web has come the insight that currently available methods for finding and using information on the web are often insufficient. In order to move the Web from a data repository to an information resource, a totally new way of organizing information is needed. The advent of the Semantic Web promises better retrieval methods by incorporating the data’s semantics and exploiting the semantics during the search process. Such a development needs special attention from the geospatial perspective so that the particularities of geospatial meaning are captured appropriately. The creation the Semantic Geospatial Web needs the development multiple spatial and terminological ontologies, each with a formal semantics; the representation of those semantics such that they are available both to machines for processing and to people for understanding; and the processing of

A digital library typically includes a set of keywords (or subject terms) for each document in its collection(s). For some applications, including natural resource management, geographic location (e.g., the place of a study or a project) is very important. The metadata for such documents needs to indicate the location(s) associated with a document - and users need to be able to search for documents by keyword as well as location. We have developed and implemented a digital library that supports -- but does not require - georeferenceable documents (i.e., documents with reference to geography through the use of a textual place name). Because of their implicit spatial footprint, place names benefit from spatial reasoning and querying (e.g., to find all documents that describe work performed within a five-mile radius of a certain point) in addition to traditional keyword-based search. This paper presents the architecture for a digital library that combines spatial reasoning and selection with traditional (non-spatial) search. The contributions of this work are: (1) the use of a traditional geographic information system (GIS) for spatial processing rather than a specially tailored GIS system or a separate gazetteer and (2) the seamless integration of GIS with our thesaurus-based Metadata++ system, so users can easily take advantage of the strengths of both systems.

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Geographic information retrieval (GIR) systems aim to provide advanced functionalities for storage, organisation, searching and representation of geographic information. Digital maps, as a well–established and powerful information medium, have been widely used in GIR systems as a representation tool for geographic knowledge and geographic relationships, and provide users with capabilities to understand and reason about the geographic environment that is correlated with the retrieved information. This paper addresses several key challenges in designing and implementing of retrieval systems for geo-tagged Web content by developing an online map-based GIR system called GeoTagMapper. The components of the proposed are described in detail and the effectiveness and the usefulness of our system are demonstrated by applying it to a large collection of geo-tagged Web pages. Keywords: Geographic information retrieval, geo-tagging, online mapping, indexing, retrieval,

This paper intends to present a new conceptual framework for a modern GIR system as well as its related key technologies. In this research paper, existing GIR systems were surveyed and compared to find out the challenges we are facing in GIR and corresponding research needs in the future. New ideas on how to solve these existing problems are proposed in this paper, including a new system framework and promising key technologies. In addition, recent progress and hot technologies in geographical information science and information science fields will be presented, which will certainly be useful to build a better GIR system. It is believed that the research and discussion presented in this paper could, to some degree, facilitate the research and implementation in the field of GIR. 1.

Abstract — A Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) model is defined and the architecture of a GIR system, named Geo-Finder, is described. The GIR system is constituted by two main modules. The geo-indexing module applies bipolar criteria to automatically identify the geo-reference focus (footprint) of textual documents. The geo-retrieval module applies a context dependent matching function to evaluate queries consisting of two orthogonal constraints, a content constraint and a spatial constraint; the spatial constraint is defined by modeling the user’s perception of geographic “closeness” between the documents ’ footprint and the query footprint. For each retrieved document, two relevance scores are computed with respect to the two query conditions, that can be combined to generate an overall ranked list of documents in a flexible way, by allowing users to specify a trade off between them.

To separate or not to separate?

Our contribution is dedicated to geographic information contained in unstructured textual documents. The main focus of this article is to propose a general indexing strategy that is dedicated to spatial information, but which could be applied to temporal and thematic information as well. More specifically, we have developed a process flow that indexes the spatial information contained in textual documents. This process flow interprets spatial information and computes corresponding accurate footprints. Our goal is to normalize such heterogeneous grained and scaled spatial information (points, polylines, polygons). This normalization is carried out at the index level by grouping spatial information together within spatial areas and by using statistics to compute frequencies for such areas and weights for the retrieved documents. 1

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