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Exploiting geographic references of documents in a geographical information retrieval system using an ontology-based index

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Abstract

Both Geographic Information Systems and Information Retrieval have been very active research fields in the last decades. Lately, a new research field called Geographic Information Retrieval has appeared from the intersection of these two fields. The main goal of this field is to define index structures and techniques to efficiently store and retrieve documents using both the text and the geographic references contained within the text. We present in this paper two contributions to this research field. First, we propose a new index structure that combines an inverted index and a spatial index based on an ontology of geographic space. This structure improves the query capabilities of other proposals. Then, we describe the architecture of a system for geographic information retrieval that defines a workflow for the extraction of the geographic references in documents. The architecture also uses the index structure that we propose to solve pure spatial and textual queries as well as hybrid queries that combine both a textual and a spatial component. Furthermore, query expansion can be performed on geographic references because the index structure is based in an ontology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Database Laboratory, University of A Coruña, Campus de Elviña, 15071, A Coruña, Spain

    Nieves R. Brisaboa, Miguel R. Luaces, Ángeles S. Places & Diego Seco

Authors
  1. Nieves R. Brisaboa
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  2. Miguel R. Luaces
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  3. Ángeles S. Places
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  4. Diego Seco
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Miguel R. Luaces.

Additional information

This work has been partially supported by Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (PGE and FEDER), grant TIN2009-14560-C03-02, and by “Xunta de Galicia” ref. 08SIN009CT.

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Brisaboa, N.R., Luaces, M.R., Places, Á.S. et al. Exploiting geographic references of documents in a geographical information retrieval system using an ontology-based index. Geoinformatica 14, 307–331 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-010-0106-3

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