Inproceedings,
Approaches for determining the geographic footprint of arbitrary terms for retrieval and visualization
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL international conference on Advances in geographic information systems, page 43:1--43:4. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2008)
DOI: 10.1145/1463434.1463488
Abstract
Determining the bounds of geographic regions is an important task for geographic search engines which use concept@location-type of queries. The location a user specifies is often not contained in the underlying gazetteer or geographic database, which might be due to vernacular descriptions of regions or because the location is not a geographic region in the narrow sense, which is the case in queries like <i>campground near theme park</i>. In the present paper we describe different ways for automatically determining a geographic footprint for those locations so that a geographic search engine is able to deal with all kinds of location-descriptions. The same approaches can be used to visualize the geographic correlation of arbitrary terms, like the visualization of the spread of certain colloquialisms.</p> <p>The basic idea is to mine locations found in the top documents resulting from a query consisting of the terms the user has chosen to specify the location. We describe how this can be done using kernel density estimation, clustering and a combination thereof.
