The design and implementation of SPIRIT: a spatially aware search engine for information retrieval on the Internet

Purves, Ross S.; Clough, Paul; Jones, Christopher B.; Arampatzis, Avi; Bucher, Bénédicte; Finch, David J.; Fu, Gaihua; Joho, Hideo; Syed, Awase Khirni; Vaid, Subodh; Wang, Jinhu

doi:10.1080/13658810601169840

Cited by 141 publications

(112 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This enables us to provide access to a large amount of information via the map, without overloading the map and the user. This initial prototype is currently not available via the TNA labs site, as work is underway to integrate it more closely with the existing systems at TNA and to provide advanced functionality such as providing search assistance to the user by using a gazetteer or geographical ontology to suggest locations spatially related to the current search position (Purves et al, 2007).…”

Section: 21geographical Search and Browsementioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, a study by Zhang et al (2006) found that 12.7 per cent of queries submitted to a web search engine contained a place name; Sanderson and Han (2007) also showed that queries for city names were repeated more frequently than for other names (e.g., country and state). This information can be exploited and used to provide spatial awareness to information systems (see, e.g., Buckland et al, 2007;Purves et al, 2007)). Zong et al (2005) discuss how the ability to perform query by location can be an important and useful addition to a digital library and Buckland et al (2007, p. 376) concur with this in saying "libraries have a broad need to support geographic search".…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Linking archival data to location: a case study at the UK National Archives

Clough

Tang

Hall

et al. 2011

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose -The National Archives (TNA) is the UK government's official archive. It stores and maintains records spanning over a thousand years in both physical and digital form. Much of the information held by TNA includes references to place and frequently user queries to TNA's online catalogue involve searches for location. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how TNA have extracted the geographic references in their historic data to improve access to the archives. Approach -To be able to quickly enhance the existing archival data with geographic information, existing technologies from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) have been utilised and adapted to historical archives. Findings -Enhancing the archival records with geographic information has enabled TNA to quickly develop a number of case-studies highlighting how geographic information can improve access to large-scale archival collections. The use of existing methods from the GIR domain and technologies, such as OpenLayers, enabled us to quickly implement this process in a way that is easily transferrable to other institutions. Practical implications -The methods and technologies described in this paper can be adapted by other archives to similarly enhance access to their historic data. Also the data-sharing methods described can be used to enable the integration of knowledge held at different archival institutions. Value -Place is one of the core dimensions for TNA's archival data. Many of the records that we hold make reference to place data (wills, legislation, court cases…) and approximately one fifth of users' searches involve place names. However, there are still a number of open questions regarding the adaptation of existing GIR methods to the history domain. This paper presents an overview over available GIR methods and the challenges in applying them to historical data.

show abstract

Section: 21geographical Search and Browsementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking archival data to location: a case study at the UK National Archives

Clough

Tang

Hall

et al. 2011

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An approach that is based on geographical operators is reported by Purves et al [139] who describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of an IR system that is capable of handling queries in the form of the triplet of <theme><geographical relationship><location>. The core of this system is the indexing process that is capable of detecting geographical data in the documents.…”

Section: Detecting Query Intents Using Geographical Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextual Search: A Computational Framework

Melucci

2012

FNT in Information Retrieval

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…In other words, it is a bridge between the users and the system [73]. The user query interface of the search engine is composed of seven parts, including a text input field for entering query terms, an interactive graphical interface, a bounding box interface, a retrieval mode interface, a relationships interface, a search button and a textual list as shown in Figure 8.…”

Section: User Query Interfacementioning

confidence: 99%

Discovering Land Cover Web Map Services from the Deep Web with JavaScript Invocation Rules

Hou

Chen

2016

IJGI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Automatic discovery of isolated land cover web map services (LCWMSs) can potentially help in sharing land cover data. Currently, various search engine-based and crawler-based approaches have been developed for finding services dispersed throughout the surface web. In fact, with the prevalence of geospatial web applications, a considerable number of LCWMSs are hidden in JavaScript code, which belongs to the deep web. However, discovering LCWMSs from JavaScript code remains an open challenge. This paper aims to solve this challenge by proposing a focused deep web crawler for finding more LCWMSs from deep web JavaScript code and the surface web. First, the names of a group of JavaScript links are abstracted as initial judgements. Through name matching, these judgements are utilized to judge whether or not the fetched webpages contain predefined JavaScript links that may prompt JavaScript code to invoke WMSs. Secondly, some JavaScript invocation functions and URL formats for WMS are summarized as JavaScript invocation rules from prior knowledge of how WMSs are employed and coded in JavaScript. These invocation rules are used to identify the JavaScript code for extracting candidate WMSs through rule matching. The above two operations are incorporated into a traditional focused crawling strategy situated between the tasks of fetching webpages and parsing webpages. Thirdly, LCWMSs are selected by matching services with a set of land cover keywords. Moreover, a search engine for LCWMSs is implemented that uses the focused deep web crawler to retrieve and integrate the LCWMSs it discovers. In the first experiment, eight online geospatial web applications serve as seed URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) and crawling scopes; the proposed crawler addresses only the JavaScript code in these eight applications. All 32 available WMSs hidden in JavaScript code were found using the proposed crawler, while not one WMS was discovered through the focused crawler-based approach. This result shows that the proposed crawler has the ability to discover WMSs hidden in JavaScript code. The second experiment uses 4842 seed URLs updated daily. The crawler found a total of 17,874 available WMSs, of which 11,901 were LCWMSs. Our approach discovered a greater number of services than those found using previous approaches. It indicates that the proposed crawler has a large advantage in discovering LCWMSs from the surface web and from JavaScript code. Furthermore, a simple case study demonstrates that the designed LCWMS search engine represents an important step towards realizing land cover information integration for global mapping and monitoring purposes.

show abstract

The design and implementation of SPIRIT: a spatially aware search engine for information retrieval on the Internet

Cited by 141 publications

References 30 publications

Linking archival data to location: a case study at the UK National Archives

Linking archival data to location: a case study at the UK National Archives

Contextual Search: A Computational Framework

Discovering Land Cover Web Map Services from the Deep Web with JavaScript Invocation Rules

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About