Extraction and exploration of spatio-temporal information in documents
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
We take great pleasure in welcoming you all to the Fifth Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR'08). The GIR workshops have been running since 2004 and have been hosted by SIGIR and CIKM. These workshops are now firmly established together with GeoCLEF, as a forum for the exchange of information on the development and success of new techniques within the field of Geographic Information Retrieval. We are delighted to see a vibrant mix of regulars and newcomers at this year's workshop having received submissions from an increasing breadth of groups and locations, demonstrating that interest in GIR continues to grow. The call for papers resulted in a good variety of short and long papers relating to differing aspects of GIR, including the recognition and disambiguation of geographic references in documents, web mining to obtain knowledge of place names, crawling the deep web for geographic information, methods for interpreting vague spatial language and various aspects of query processing for GIR. All papers were reviewed by three members of the programme committee. The 5 long and 9 short papers that were selected for presentation from the 23 papers submitted provide valuable contributions to the state of the art in GIR and cast new light on some of the major challenges. We hope that the workshop will succeed not only in its aim of reporting on where we are now, but also on how we in the academic research community can set a distinctive, relevant and above all exciting research agenda for the coming years. Our keynote talk this year is delivered by Inderjeet Mani, of Mitre Corporation and the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. It is entitled "Understanding Geographic Language: Heading Where, Exactly?", In his talk Inderjeet will discuss the challenges posed for information retrieval by the precise yet vague manner in which humans can communicate geographic information. He will argue that, while natural language processing has made some progress in understanding geographic language, a far more concerted effort is needed if we are ever to scale up to the varieties of natural language data found on-line.