Geographic Information Retrieval

This special issue of SIGSPATIAL Special presents a series of notes describing the state of the art in Geographic Information Retrieval. The notes are intended to provide a review of some of the challenges presented as key research areas in Geographic Information Retrieval [Larson, Jones and Purves], and reflect progress in the field in the intervening years. The challenges as originally set out in [2] were the following: • detecting geographical references in the form of place names and associated spatial natural language qualifiers within text documents and in users' queries; • disambiguating place names to determine which particular instance of a name is intended; • geometric interpretation of the meaning of vague place names, such as the 'Midlands' and of vague spatial language such as 'near'; • indexing documents with respect to their geographic context as well as their non-spatial thematic content; • ranking the relevance of documents with respect to geography as well as theme; • developing effective user interfaces that help users to find what they want; and • developing methods to evaluate the success of GIR.