Geographic Focus Detection for Web Documents using Multiple Location Taggers

Being able to identify locations associated to a Web resource is essential for providing location-based Web applications. However, geographical information in Web documents is rarely supplied in a machine-readable way and therefore not easily discoverable. As a consequence, it is necessary to extract geographical keywords from Web documents and to associate locations with them. This method is called location tagging. In this paper we present a location tagging approach for unstructured documents which utilizes multiple external location providers. Detected locations are ranked according to their relevance for the document, in order to identify a document’s geographical focus, which is its most representative location. We present an exemplary implementation of our proposed approach using two location providers and evaluate our method’s applicability.