Context-Aware Search Spaces for Queries with Spatial Relations

Web-mapping services, like Google Maps, allow natural language queries, like “Hotels Freiburg”. These queries are interpreted as “Hotels in Freiburg” or “Hotels near Freiburg”. In this thesis, we introduce the two new spatial relation “between” and the compass directions, allowing queries like “Gas stations between Freiburg and Stuttgart” or “Hotels north of Freiburg”. To achieve this, we analyse many different queries and decide whether they make sense in a given context. It might make sense to search for “cities between cities”, whereas it makes less sense to search for “cities between countries”. Then, we create a toolbox that returns a search polygon for every context-aware query. In a last step, we compare the results from our toolbox with our expectations. We show that nearly all of our queries return useful results and conclude what possibilities are open for future work.