Weibel Purves
Fakultäten » Mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät » Geographisches Institut » Geographic Information Science » Prof. Dr. Robert Weibel » Weibel Purves
Completed research project
| Title / Titel | SPIRIT - Spatially-Aware Information Retrieval on the Internet | ||||||
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| Abstract (PDF, 14 KB) | |||||||
| Summary / Zusammenfassung | Many resources on the internet refer to somewhere on Earth, but web search technology is poorly equipped to find information relating to geographical locations. This project will design, implement and test a spatially-aware search engine that finds documents and datasets relating exactly or approximately to places or regions referred to in a query. A multi-modal user interface will allow the description of places using text or an interactive multi-scale map. A geographical ontology will enable expansion of query terms to include alternative names and places that are nearby. The resources returned will be relevance-ranked with regard to geographical and thematic space and displayed both in textual and map form. To raise the visibility of internet resources to spatial search engines, data enrichment techniques will be developed to extract, and encode as metadata, the geographical semantics of web pages and digital map datasets. The GIS Division at the Department of Geography of the University of Zurich will focus on the design of a multi-modal interface for the visualisation, interpretation and refinement of spatial searches by users. The interface will use novel techniques to convey the nature of search results from non-specific geographical queries. |
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| Keywords / Suchbegriffe | GIS, information retrieval, visualisation, search engines, interfaces, ontology, spatial, multi-scale, metadata | ||||||
| Project leadership and contacts / Projektleitung und Kontakte |
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| Funding source(s) / Unterstützt durch |
EU Framework 5, IST - 2001 |
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| In collaboration with / In Zusammenarbeit mit |
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| Duration of Project / Projektdauer | May 2002 to May 2005 |