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Geographical Information Retrieval with Ontologies of Place

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Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2205))

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Abstract

Geographical context is required of many information retrieval tasks in which the target of the search may be documents, images or records which are referenced to geaographical space only by means of place names. Often there may be an imprecise match between the query name and the names associated with the candidate sources of information. There is a need therefore for geographical information retrieval facilities that can rank the relevance of candidate information with respect to geographical closeness as well as semantic closeness with respect to the topic of interest. Here we present an ontology of place that combines limited coordinate data with qualitative spatial relationships between places. This parsimonious model of place is intended to support information retrieval tasks that may be global in scope. The ontology has been implemented with a semantic modelling system linking non-spatial conceptual hierarchies with the place ontology. An hierachical distance measure is combined with Euclidean distance between place centroids to create a hybrid spatial distance measure. This can be combined with thematic distance, based on classification semantics, to create an integrated semantic closeness measure that can be used for a relevance ranking of retrieved objects.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Cardiff University Queenss Buildings, PO Box 916, Newport Road, Cardiff, CF24 3XF, UK

    Christopher B. Jones

  2. Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK

    Harith Alani

  3. School of Computing, University of Glamorgan, UK

    Douglas Tudhope

Authors
  1. Christopher B. Jones
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  2. Harith Alani
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  3. Douglas Tudhope
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA

    Daniel R. Montello

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Jones, C.B., Alani, H., Tudhope, D. (2001). Geographical Information Retrieval with Ontologies of Place. In: Montello, D.R. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2205. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45424-1_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45424-1_22

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42613-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45424-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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