Exploiting the Internet As a Geospatial Database

The World Wide Web is the largest collection of geospatial data. However, this tremendous resource is almost unexploited. This observation holds for individuals accessing the WWW by their favorite search engine as well as for corporate users performing geospatial analyses. Searching for a particular location by typing its name (in combination with the key words a user is interested in) retrieves often unsatisfactory results. First, names of locations might be homonyms. Second, the name of the location might not appear in a potentially interesting page. Third and worst of all, an interesting page may only refer to a location just outside the one specified. There is no possibility to express proximity or topological relationships. For the same reasons, geospatial analyses (e.g., in what regions is Audi more popular than BMW) also fail. Due to its high potential, there is increasing interest in supporting a geospatial information access to the WWW [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. In this paper, we provide a brief overview on techniques for mapping web resources to locations. We outline an architecture for mapping URLs to geographic locations, that utilizes multiple techniques, integrates and further processes their results. Based on this mapping, we design a geospatial search engine. Such search engines differ fundamentally from their traditional counterpart. Finally, a geospatial analyses that use the WWW as tremendous source of data will be considered as another application of such a mapping. The paper concludes with an overview on challenging research questions.