Seminar on
Geographic Information Retrieval:
Algorithms and Approaches
Prof. Ray R. Larson
University of California, Berkeley
School of Information
13:30-15:00, Monday, August 3rd, 2009
Room No. 1208 & 1210, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, JapanThe goal of Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) is to retrieve relevant information
resources in response to queries with geographic constraints. GIR implies that the indexing
and retrieval of objects in a digital collection takes into account some form ofgeoreferencing, and may use various forms of geographical proximity, containment, orother spatial relations in estimating or predicting geographic relevance. Systems thatprovide searches using GIR methods, including geographic digital libraries, and locationaware web search engines, are based on a collection of georeferenced information resources
and methods to spatially search these resources with geographic location as part of theirsearch specifications.
Information resources in digital library collections can be considered georeferenced
if they are spatially indexed by one or more regions or points on the surface of the Earth,where the specific locations of these regions are encoded using spatial coordinates directly(geometrically), or indirectly by toponyms (place names). In this lecture we will examine
the effectiveness of Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) methods in IR systems.
We will show how various types of information may benefit from explicit
geographic search, and where text-based place name search may be sufficient. We will also
show how implicit geographic search (or geographic browsing) can be used to dynamicallygenerate geographic searches in geographic interfaces like Google Earth. We will
describe the algorithms used for Geographic search and how these may be combined withtopical text searches. In addition we will show results from the GeoCLEF IR evaluation for
text-based geographic search.

Prof. Ray R. Larson
University of California, Berkeley
School of Information
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Professor Ray R. Larson is a faculty member of the University of California, Berkeley, inthe School of Information. Prof. Larson specializes in the design and performance
evaluation of information access systems, and the evaluation of user interaction with thosesystems. His current research focuses on Geographic Information Retrieval, CrossLanguage Information Retrieval and Structured (XML) retrieval using probabilistic
methods. His background includes work as a programmer/analyst with the University ofCalifornia Division of Library Automation (DLA) where he was involved in the design,development, and performance evaluation of the UC public access online union catalog(MELVYL). His past and current research has concentrated on the design and evaluation ofinformation retrieval systems, with an emphasis on digital libraries. Prof. Larson was theprincipal investigator for the “CHESHIRE Demonstration and Evaluation Project”
sponsored by the US Dept. of Education, that developed a next-generation online catalogand full-text retrieval system. He was a co-principal investigator for the “SearchingUnfamiliar Metadata Vocabularies” project sponsored by DARPA. Prof. Larson was also
the principal investigator of the “Cross-Domain Resource Discovery: Integrated Discovery
and Use of Textual, Numeric and Spatial Data” project sponsored by NSF as part of theInternational Digital Libraries program.
Prof. Larson was Co-PI along with Michael Buckland and Fredric C. Gey for the IMLS
National Leadership grants “Seamless Searching of Numeric and Textual Resources”,“Going Places in the Catalog: Improved Geographic Access” and most recently, “Supportfor the Learner: What, Where, When and Who”. Prof. Larson is the PI on the recently
awarded IMLS National Leadership grant “Bringing Lives to Light: Biography in Context.”
Prof. Larson also teaches courses on the design and evaluation of information systems,
including IS202 “Information Organization and Retrieval'', IS257 “Database Management”,
IS240 “Principles of Information Retrieval”, and IS245 “Organization ofInformation in Collections”.