The place of place in geographical IR

The most common kind of collections for GIR so far are the Web and other document collections, which are mainly textual. This paper is concerned with the non-trivial relationship between reference to place in natural language (NL) and common GIR assumptions. There are two main ways in which NL texts and GIR meet: in the attempt to derive or populate geo-ontologies from text itself, and in the attempt to label Web pages with what is called geo-scopes, deriving these from clues in the pages themselves. We will survey briefly the two, noting in passing that both approaches are bottom-up in the sense that they look at the texts, but the second makes use of a prior information source, a geo-ontology, which is typically top-down (see GeoNet-PT01 in Table 1).