Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Geographical information retrieval

Abstract

We take great pleasure in welcoming you all to the Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR'07). This is the fourth in a series of workshops on GIR, which have been held alternately at SIGIR and CIKM since 2004. The workshops are now becoming firmly established, together with GeoCLEF, as a forum for the exchange of information on the development and success of new techniques within the field of Geographic Information Retrieval. We are delighted to see a vibrant mix of regulars and newcomers at this year's workshop having received submissions from an increasing breadth of groups and locations, demonstrating that interest in GIR continues to grow. The call for papers resulted in an interesting variety of short and long papers related to differing aspects of GIR, including the analysis of geographic needs and the development of ontologies to support GIR, through to the perennial problems of unambiguously identifying geographic locations within text documents; the application of techniques to intelligently deal with and process user queries; the mining and exploitation of geographic information and a wide range of examples of the application of GIR. All papers were reviewed by at least two members of the programme committee. The 12 long and 9 short papers that were selected for presentation provide new insights into the state of the art in GIR and cast new light on the major challenges. We hope that the workshop will succeed not only in its aim of reporting on where we are now, but also on how we in the academic research community can set a distinctive, relevant and above all exciting research agenda for the coming year.