Description:
<jats:p>This special issue of SIGSPATIAL Special presents a series of notes describing the state of the art in Geographic Information Retrieval. The notes are intended to provide a review of some of the challenges presented as key research areas in Geographic Information Retrieval [Larson, Jones and Purves], and reflect progress in the field in the intervening years. The challenges as originally set out in [2] were the following:</jats:p>
<jats:p>• detecting geographical references in the form of place names and associated spatial natural language qualifiers within text documents and in users' queries;</jats:p>
<jats:p>• disambiguating place names to determine which particular instance of a name is intended;</jats:p>
<jats:p>• geometric interpretation of the meaning of vague place names, such as the 'Midlands' and of vague spatial language such as 'near';</jats:p>
<jats:p>• indexing documents with respect to their geographic context as well as their non-spatial thematic content;</jats:p>
<jats:p>• ranking the relevance of documents with respect to geography as well as theme;</jats:p>
<jats:p>• developing effective user interfaces that help users to find what they want; and</jats:p>
<jats:p>• developing methods to evaluate the success of GIR.</jats:p>