A Visual Interactive System for Spatial Querying and Ranking of Geographic Regions

Abstract

Local search services provide information access about specific locations, facilities and geographic points of interest. However, in various information seeking situations users are not only interested in the specific geo entities but the composition of urban areas and geographic regions. Users need to specify, analyze and compare the geographic regions, which is not feasible with the current local search systems as their querying, ranking and presentation methods are centered towards definite locations and entities. In this paper we propose a visual interactive system that goes beyond the explicit locations, and support the search and exploration of geographic regions. The proposed system allows user to illustrate their geographic regions of interest via spatial querying on map interface, and subsequently search for the related relevant regions. The relevance assessment of geographic regions is based on the categorical distribution of geo-located facilities. Users could interact with the categorical overview of the regions, to analyze the composition of selected regions, as well as to adapt it to their criteria of interests.