Retrieving Documents with Geographic References Using a Spatial Index Structure Based on Ontologies

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 a new index structure that combines an inverted index, a spatial index, and an ontology-based structure. This structure improves the query capabilities of other proposals. In addition, we describe the architecture of a system for geographic information retrieval that uses this new index structure. This architecture defines a workflow for the extraction of the geographic references in the document.