Vagueness is prevalent within the geographical domain, yet it is handled poorly in existing ontology approaches. A proposed way to rectify this is to ground the ontology upon the data. By grounding the ontology, we make an explicit link between the ontology and the data, and thus allow reasoning to be made within the context of the particular data. In order to ground the ontology upon the data,...

The work presented in this paper concerns Information Retrieval from geographical documents, i.e. documents with a major geographic component. The final aim, in response to an informational query of the user, is to return a ranked list of relevant passages in selected documents, allowing text browsing within them. We consider in this paper the spatial component of the texts and the queries. The...

Before addressing the diverse functionalities that can be found in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) today, a definition of a geographic information system, its purpose, and its general architecture shall be given. The different forms of GIS that are found in today’s ever-expanding range of information technology tools will therefore be discussed in Sect. 6.1. The core of each GIS is constit...