Defining a Workflow Process for Textual and Geographic Indexing of Documents

Many public organizations are working on the construction of spatial data infrastructures (SDI) that will enable them to share their geographic information. However, not only geographic data are managed in these SDIs, and, in general, in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), but also many textual documents must be stored and retrieved (such as urban planning permissions and administrative files). Textual index structures must be integrated with GIS in order to provide an efficient access to these documents. Furthermore, many of these documents include geographic references within their texts. Therefore, queries with geographic scopes should be correctly answered by the index structure and the special characteristics of these geographic references, due to their spatial nature, should be taken into account. We present in this paper a workflow process that allows a gradual and collaborative creation of a document repository. These documents can be efficiently retrieved using queries regarding their texts and regarding the geographic references included within them. Moreover, the index structure and the supported query types are briefly described.