STEWARD: architecture of a spatio-textual search engine

ABSTRACT

STEWARD ("Spatio-Textual Extraction on the Web Aiding Retrieval of Documents"), a system for extracting, querying, and visualizing textual references to geographic locations in unstructured text documents, is presented. Methods for retrieving and processing web documents, extracting and disambiguating georeferences, and identifying geographic focus are described. A brief overview of STEWARD's querying capabilities, as well as the design of an intuitive user interface, are provided. Finally, several application scenarios and future extensions to STEWARD are discussed.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Performance

Keywords:
STEWARD, geocoding, spatio-textual search engine