Architecture, Principles and Development of Geographic Information Web Retrieval
Yong Liu · Tropical Geography · 2010
There are many unstructured digital texts containing geographic information on the Web.Traditional Asearch engines can not meet people's demand for these digital resources.Geographic information Web retrieval aims at providing more powerful Web search tools to satisfy people’s double query requirements both in thematic and in geographic information.This paper first introduces the meaning,architecture and basic principles of geographic information web retrieval,then elaborated GIR’s development,including two important workshops in this field:GIR and GeoCLEF.The paper also discusses the differences between geographic information web retrieval system and common geographic search engines such as Google Maps and Yahoo Local.A representative geographic information web retrieval system,Spatially-Aware Information Retrieval on the Internet is reviewed.Finally,the challenges which geographic information web retrieval is facing are pointed out,they include construction of geographic ontology,extraction of geographic information from web pages,building spatial index and double retrieval model,ranking search results and visualizing search results on a map.