User
and system requirements
exploration
of different aspects of spatially-aware retrieval with regard to
textual and graphical interactions. The results will feed into a
specification of system functionality.
Geographical
and conceptual ontologies -
model
both the vocabulary and the spatial structure of places for purposes
of information retrieval. This enables retrieval of resources referring
to alternative place names (e.g. historical variants) and places
that are similar in location to the place specified in the query.
Metadata
extraction and semantic enrichment
automatic
and/or semi-automatic ontology-based textual and geo-data analysis
techniques for generating geographical annotations will be developed.
Relevance
ranking
will
develop procedures that can determine similarity between metadata
extracted from a web page and the content of a geographical web
query, in order to present relevance-ranked query results to the
user. Ontology-based geographical relevance ranking will be performed.
Design
and implementation of core spatial search engine
will
create and test the performance of the core search engine functionality
for spatially-oriented search and retrieval with a large collection
of web documents. There are two main aspects: extension of an existing
basic search system to support a large test collection, and introduction
of spatial indexing of the web database.
Multi-modal
search engine interface
will
facilitate query construction via a structured textual dialogue,
interactive multi-scale maps, and sketching. The ontologies will
be used to support geographical term expansion for query formulation
and user feedback. Query results will be returned in textual and
graphical form.
Evaluation
will
determine the effectiveness and usability of the final prototype
for purposes of geographical information retrieval on the Internet.
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