Title
The design and implementation of SPIRIT: a spatially aware search engine for information retrieval on the Internet
Abstract
Much of the information stored on the web contains geographical context, but current search engines treat such context in the same way as all other content. In this paper we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of a spatially aware search engine which is capable of handling queries in the form of the triplet of 〈theme〉〈spatial relationship〉〈location〉. The process of identifying geographic references in documents and assigning appropriate footprints to documents, to be stored together with document terms in an appropriate indexing structure allowing real-time search, is described. Methods allowing users to query and explore results which have been relevance-ranked in terms of both thematic and spatial relevance have been implanted and a usability study indicates that users are happy with the range of spatial relationships available and intuitively understand how to use such a search engine. Normalised precision for 38 queries, containing four types of spatial relationships, is significantly higher (p
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1080/13658810601169840
International Journal of Geographical Information Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
spatially aware search engine,information retrieval,appropriate footprint,real-time search,current search engine,spatial relationship,normalised precision,search engine,appropriate indexing structure,spatial relevance,geographical context,spatial index
Data mining,Human–computer information retrieval,Search engine,Okapi BM25,Information retrieval,Computer science,Full text search,Usability,Search engine indexing,Ranking (information retrieval),Concept search,Database
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
21
7
1365-8816
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
75
3.53
35
Authors
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ross S. Purves124325.81
Paul Clough21308111.91
Christopher B. Jones3106795.29
Avi Arampatzis444339.38
Benedicte Bucher5753.53
David Finch61269.21
Gaihua Fu724516.01
Hideo Joho888170.47
Awase Khirni Syed9753.53
Subodh Vaid1023413.17
Bisheng Yang1130833.15