Geographic IR Helped by Structured Geospatial Knowledge Resources.
Antonio Toral, Óscar Ferrández, Elisa Noguera, Zornitsa Kozareva, Andrés Montoyo, Rafael Muñoz · 2006
For the participation of the University of Alicante in the second edition of GeoCLEF, we have researched the incorporation of geographic knowledge into Geographic Infor-mation Retrieval (GIR). Our system is made up of an IR module used for several years in the CLEF competitions (IR-n) and a Geographic Knowledge module (Geonames). The latter is used to carry out an expansion of the initial topic by adding geographic items. The geographic items and relations are extracted from the topics and queries using the Geonames database are built from them. The returned information by this geographic resource is incorporated into the topics which at the end are processed by IR-n. We have submitted several runs, in order to compare the performance of the usage of a classic IR with the usage of geographic knowledge. The results show that the addition of geographic knowledge has negative impact on the obtained precision. However, the fact that for some topics the obtained results are better, makes us con-clude that the addition of this knowledge could be useful but a lot of research effort is needed in order to determine how this knowledge should be correctly applied.