Characteristics of geographic information needs

Abstract

A Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) system for answering geographic queries has to cope with various information needs, which have a wide range of contexts and implicit requirements. A user, for example, who is looking for a place to spend his or her holidays certainly has a different understanding of distance than a user looking for a bar in the city he or she lives in.To get a better understanding of geographic information needs and their implications for GIR systems, we analysed real world (geographic) queries with regard to different facets of geographic references in queries. The results of this analysis are presented in this paper, the aim of which was a classification of the geographic aspects of information needs. We present empirical results and line out possible classification criteria, which could be helpful in designing GIR systems that are able to consider different semantics of geographic references in queries.

Representing Context Information for Document Retrieval

“…We decided to test the BoC representation in the Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) environment using the CLEF collection for evaluating the Geo-CLEF task [10,11]. Our decision was taken because GIR is a specialized IR branch, where the search of documents is based not only on conceptual keywords, but also on spatial information [12,13]. Going back to the query used as an example in the introduction "Floods in European cities", it is evident that GIR needs to go beyond lexical analysis and then capture or use some context information to satisfy the user's information needs, for example by matching "cities" with actual city names.…”

A Ranking Approach Based on Example Texts for Geographic Information Retrieval

“…geographical references) [1,2]. Recent development of GIR systems [3] evidence that: i) traditional IR machines are able to retrieve the majority of the relevant documents for most queries, but that, ii) they have severe difficulties to generate a pertinent ranking of them.…”

Ranking Refinement via Relevance Feedback in Geographic Information Retrieval

“…Such is the case of Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR), which is a specialized IR branch, where search of documents is based not only in conceptual keywords, but also on spatial information (e.g., geographical references) [5]. For example, for the query: "Cities near active volcanoes", expected documents should mention explicit city and volcanoes names.…”