An Index Structure To Retrieve Documents With Geographic Information

Both geographic information systems and information retrieval have been very active research fields in the last decades. Lately, a new research field called geographic information retrieval has appeared from the intersection of these two fields. The main goal of this field is to define index structures and techniques to efficiently store and retrieve documents using both the text and the geographic references contained within the text. We present in this paper the architecture of a system for geographic information retrieval. It defines a workflow for the extraction of the geographic references in the document. In addition, a new index structure is defined that combines an inverted index, a spatial index, and an ontology. This structure improves the query capabilities of other proposals.