WORKSHOP REPORTWorkshop on Geographic Information Retrieval
held at SIGIR’06
Ross Purves
Chris Jones
University of Zurich
Cardiff University
rsp@geo.unizh.chc.b.jones@cs.cf.ac.uk
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/~rsp/gir06

1Workshop motivation

August 2006 saw the third in a series of workshops held to discuss the state of the art in Geographic
Information Retrieval held in conjunction with SIGIR’06. The original call for papers for the workshop
suggested the workshop should discuss further progress within the field and potential future researchstrands. Topics considered relevant for the workshop included the following:• architectures for geographic search engines;• spatial indexing of documents and other media resources;• extraction of geographical context from documents and geo-datasets;• geographical annotation techniques for geo-referenced media;• design, construction, maintenance and access methods for geographical ontologies, gazetteers
and geographical thesauri;• geographical query interfaces for the web and geo-spatial libraries;• visualising the results of geographic searches; and• relevance ranking for geographical search.
A total of 25 papers were submitted for the workshop and after a rapid and comprehensive review
process by our program committee 16 of these were selected for presentation in Seattle. In a departurefrom previous formats it was also decided on this occasion to invite a keynote speaker to address futurechallenges in the field of GIR. John Frank, of MetaCarta kindly agreed to attend the workshop andpresent a keynote to the assembled masses.

2Workshop summary

This year’s workshop had the highest attendance yet with 45 researchers from academia, funding bodies
and industry squeezing into a seminar room for a stimulating and useful discussion of where we are andwhere we are going with GIR.
Individual papers from the workshop are available for downloading at
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/~rsp/gir06.

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The workshop was divided into 4 sessions, starting with a discussion of Place names and geoparsing
where a range of topics centered around the identification, extraction and grounding of place names
within texts was presented. In the second session, Query processing and spatial language, a set ofpapers which addressed issues related to query formulation and geographic representation of documents
was presented. These papers included the analysis of geographic queries to existing search engines,
methods to deal with location in query, fuzzy spatial reasoning in search and the geographical serving
area of web resources. This session featured papers from both Yahoo! and Microsoft Research,indicating the importance of GIR to commercial providers of search.
Following a brown bag lunch we kicked off with a stimulating keynote from John Frank of MetaCarta. John’s
keynote, entitled “Cartographic Information Retrieval”, focused on the fact that whether or not that was ourintention, GIR inherently involved important cartographic challenges. John posed the following
questions, which from the perspective of a company directly involved with GIR, he considered worthy
research challenges where current techniques fell short:• How should IR label relief representation?
• How should IR align with geometric layers?
• How should IR generalize across scales?
• What is the value of a georef?
His presentation was richly annotated with maps and examples and provoked a stimulating discussion of
possibilities for future research directions.
The following session, entitled Access methods and integration included a variety of papers addressing
issues related to the association of documents and parts of documents with simple and complex
descriptions of locations through geographic ontologies, techniques for the distributed storage of suchinformation in hash tables and, importantly, methods for ranking the results of geographic search. Ray
Larson rounded the session off with a discussion on the current state of GeoCLEF, The CLEF CrossLanguage Geographic Information Retrieval Track.
In the final session of the day, GIR Systems, a number of prototypes of fully featured GIR systems werepresented. These included a system implementing geographic search for person photograph collections
and the development of a context-aware geographic search system. An further example of geographic
search illustrated the influence of so-called implicit locations, and a novel application tested thepossibilities of retrieving similar travel routes by chunking GPS routes into textual descriptions.
In the evening the workshop attendees adjourned to more comfortable surroundings to carry on ourdiscussions and experience Greek cuisine Seattle style. This year’s workshop would not have beenpossible without the help of the SIGIR local and workshop organizers, our program committee, John
Frank’s enthusiastic and stimulating response to our invitation to give a keynote and most of all theinterest and active participation of all the attendees in presenting papers or participating in discussions.
Thank you all!

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