Geographical Information Retrieval

Geographical information is recorded in a wide variety of media and document types. There are innumerable paper-based books, reports, images and maps; there are computer databases and digital maps along with vast numbers of web pages containing text, images and digital versions of articles, books and reports. Over the past few decades information technology for accessing geographical information has focused on the combination of digital maps and databases that characterise the majority of GIS. It is only in recent years that much attention has been paid to the development of computer systems to retrieve geographically-specific information from the relatively unstructured but immense resource of documents that compose the world-wide web (e.g. Larson 1996, McCurley 2001, Egenhofer 2002, Rauch et al. 2003, Purves et al. 2007).