Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) community has generally accepted the thesis that both thematic and geographic aspect of documents are useful for GIR. This paper describes a preliminary experiment exploring this thesis by seperately index-ing/searching geographical relevant-terms (place names, geo-spatial relations, geographic concepts and geographic adjacetives) extracted from reference ...

Due to the growth of geo-tagged images, recent web and mobile applications provide search capabilities for images that are similar to a given query image and simultaneously within a given geographical area. In this paper, we focus on designing index structures to expedite these spatial-visual searches. We start by baseline indexes that are straightforward extensions of the current popular spati...

Based on the monitoring of five heavy metal elements in the surface sediments of the Pearl River in South China, potential toxicity of the heavy metals was assessed using consensus-based sediment quality guidelines (SQGs) method and geo-accumulation (I(geo)) index method. The monitoring results showed the heavy metal concentrations were significantly and positively correlated with each other, d...

The "Agios Philippos" mine in the Kirki region (NE Greece) has been abandoned in 1998 after half a century of ore exploration without a reclamation or remediation plan. This article aims at elucidating the potential environmental risks associated with this site by quantifying pollution in tailing basins, stream waters, stream sediments and agricultural fields. Concentrations of heavy metals in ...

BACKGROUND Heavy metal pollution in the sediment of the Yellow River draws wide attention in the recent years. The Yellow River Wetland Nature Reserve of Zhengzhou is one of the major wetlands of the river and located at the beginning of the lower reach. In this article, we aimed to investigate the degree and the sources of the metal pollution in the reserve. METHODS Metals as Cu, Pb, Cr, Cd ...

The use of artificial neural networks has increased in many areas of engineering. In particular, this method has been applied to many geotechnical engineering problems and demonstrated some degree of success. A review of the literature reveals that it has been used successfully in modeling soil behavior, site characterization, earth retaining structures, settlement of structures, slope stabilit...

We have recently been witnessing the growing establishment of map-centered web-based geo-portals on national, regional and local levels. However, a particular issue with these geo-portals is that each instance has been implemented in different ways in terms of design, usability, functionality, interaction possibilities, map size and symbologies. In this paper, we try to tackle these shortcoming...

Recently ontology research has received much attention in geo-information science and the concept of ontology is very important for spatial information concept modeling and data sharing, classification of geographical classes. More importantly, it enriches the semantic theory of spatial information. Geo-information services and geo-information interpretation and extraction are the two main appl...