Exploratory representations for GIR from the internet

Among the many information sources, the internet has evolved as the one that is most widely used. Much of the information on the internet involves some geographical context. Extracting this geographical context from internet documents has therefore drawn interest from geographic information science and computer science to exploit this potential resource. This information seeking and extraction process, however, is made harder by the fact that in contrast to conventional databases, internet documents are essentially unstructured, incomplete, heterogeneous and dynamic in nature. This book establishes the need for a geographic search engine as a key element of a semantic web, since geography is perhaps one of the most familiar and common means by which we express our information requests. We start off with a comprehensive framework for the extraction of geographic information, investigate various exploratory representations of geographic information retrieved from the internet and finally draw empirical measures to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of these representations in supporting the exploratory information seeking process.