Call for papers on geographic information retrieval

[Ari Jolma]

I forward here a call for papers on geographic information retrieval.
For example I remember a talk at FOSS4G2006, which would perfectly fit
to the kind of contributions that they are looking for.

Cheers,

Ari

Call for Papers

Special Issue of International Journal of Geographical Information Science

on Geographical Information Retrieval

Geographical Information Science has been concerned with representations
of geographic phenomena that are based largely on highly structured
digital maps in which geometry plays a major role.

There is however a vast quantity of digital geographical information
that does not conform to this pattern, based on text, in which
references to location are primarily by means of place names and natural
language terminology for spatial relationships. Conventional GIS
technology has very little support for managing this type of
information. The world wide web does provide access to a large volume of
text-based geographical information, but the standard information
retrieval tools are notable for their lack of geographical intelligence.
Thus a conventional web search engine treats place names and spatial
terminology simply as meaningless “terms” with the result that
geographical queries to search engines frequently return irrelevant
results and fail to access resources that are relevant. In the last few
years there have been efforts at both commercial and academic levels to
address these limitations and definite progress is being made towards
introducing geographical intelligence into facilities for retrieval of
textual and other relatively unstructured resources.

This special issue is intended to provide a compendium of recent
research results in geographical information retrieval (GIR). It follows
on from recent workshops on GIR at SIGIR 2006 and at CIKM 2005. Although
it is intended mainly as an outlet for publication of full papers
arising from these workshops, the special issue is open to all
researchers working in the field of GIR. We hope to publish articles
covering a range of the various aspects of the field. These include but
are not confined to :

-architectures for geographic search engines; -spatial indexing of
documents and images; -extraction of geographical context from documents
and geo-datasets; -geographical annotation techniques for documents and
images; -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; -relevance ranking for
geographical search.

We invite papers up to about 6000 words in length. Submissions, which
must be in digital form, should conform to standard IJGIS guidelines for
authors and will go through the normal peer review process. The deadline
for submissions is November 30th, 2006.

A link to the instructions for authors can be found at http://
www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13658816.asp

Note that submissions should be sent by email as attachments in a
message to c.b.jones at cs.cf.ac.uk by the specified deadline.

Enquiries regarding the special issue are welcomed and may be addressed
to either of the guest editors:

Chris Jones (c.b.jones at cs.cf.ac.uk) , School of Computer Science,
Cardiff University, 5, The Parade, Cardiff, CF24 3AA, UK and Ross Purves
(rsp at geo.unizh.ch), Department of Geography, University of Zurich –
Irchel, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland.

-- 
Prof. Ari Jolma
Geoinformaatio- ja paikannustekniikka / Geoinformation and positioning
Teknillinen Korkeakoulu / Helsinki University of Technology
tel: +358 9 451 3886 address: POBox 1200, 02015 TKK, Finland
Email: ari.jolma at tkk.fi URL: http://www.tkk.fi/~jolma