Spatial Ambiguities Optimization in GIR

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Huge amount of geographically referenced information is available on World Wide Web and has become an excellent source for retrieval of desired information. Extraction of relevant information from such a huge unstructured source is not an easy task. OBJECTIVES: In this paper, we propose a location based search engine, designing two indexes namely spatial index and inverted index. Using these indexes, we are able to solve toponym ambiguity and overlapping of documents. METHODS: To handle toponym ambiguity problem, we designed and implemented architecture for directional web document search. The architecture poses spatial followed by textual indexing for toponym resolution and to reduce overlapping of documents in geographical locations. RESULTS: The proposed architecture was implemented and tested on spatial and textural data sets. CONCLUSION: The performance is measured in terms of precision and false positive parameters and found that the proposed architecture performs better for geo/geo and geo/non-geo search queries.

Keywords

• geographical information retrieval
• geoparsing
• geotagging
• gazetteer
• spatial indexing
• textual indexing