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Geographical Information Retrieval

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Christopher B. Jones

  2. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Ross S. Purves

Authors
  1. Christopher B. Jones
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  2. Ross S. Purves
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christopher B. Jones .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Computer Science, University of Hagen, Hagen, Germany

    Ralf Hartmut Güting

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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media LLC

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Jones, C.B., Purves, R.S. (2016). Geographical Information Retrieval. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_177-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_177-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering

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