Definition
The provision of facilities to retrieve and relevance rank documents or other resources from an unstructured or partially structured collection on the basis of queries specifying both theme and geographic scope.
Historical Background
Geographical information associates things and events with locations. Since everything one does and everything that happens on Earth happens somewhere, there is a vast amount of information that can be regarded as geographical in some sense. This information is represented within a variety of media, including digital and analogue versions of text documents, images, videos and maps, as well as the structured spatial databases that are employed within most geographical information systems (GIS). In text documents the association with location is often qualitative with place names and natural language terminology (such as in, at, and near) that provide spatial context. This is in contrast to the use in GIS of, for example, digital topographic...
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Jones, C.B., Purves, R.S. (2018). Geographical Information Retrieval. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_177
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