GIR'13 workshop report: 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval Orlando, Florida, USA, 5th November 2013

Abstract

The subject of Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) is concerned with providing methods to access the vast amount of relatively unstructured geographical information that is embedded in documents on the web and in other digital resources. GIR uses and builds upon methods both from geographical information systems (GIS) technology, which is designed to access structured geo-spatial data based on digital maps, and from the field of Information Retrieval (IR) in which the emphasis is on access to text documents. There are many research challenges in developing effective GIR systems, relating for example to detection and disambiguation of references to geographic information in text, spatial indexing of documents and their content, development of spatially aware search engines, and visualization of geo-information. The Workshop on Geographical Information Retrieval provides a forum to discuss these issues and to present new research results. The GIR workshop held on 5th November 2013 at the ACM SIGSPATIAL conference in Orlando, Florida, was the seventh in a series that started in 2004 and has been held previously in combination with the SIGIR and CIKM conferences. The workshop has continued to attract a stimulating mix of researchers and practitioners from a variety of academic disciplines and industrial backgrounds.