GIR 2014 - 8th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval GIR'14

8th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval GIR'14
First Call for Papers
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http://www.geo.uzh.ch/~rsp/gir14/
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This is the first call for papers for the 8th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR'14), to be held on 4th November 2014 in conjunction with the ACM SIGSPATIAL 2014 conference in Dallas, Texas. The workshop continues the successful series of workshops held previously in cooperation with ACM SIGSPATIAL and in conjunction with SIGIR and CIKM conferences.
The purpose of the workshop is to bring together members of the vibrant and growing community of researchers and practitioners working in the field of geographic information retrieval to discuss current research activity and potential future research directions.
The subject and format of the workshop
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There is a vast quantity of information in text documents and other media that is referenced to geographic space. The discipline of Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) is concerned with developing methods to gain access to this geographical information, with a particular focus on the content of web documents and social media. Because much of the information is in the form of unstructured or semi-structured text, there is a challenge to develop methods that can automatically recognise and interpret the geographical terminology and spatial or spatio-temporal concepts that people use when recording and querying the information. GIR falls at the intersection of Information Retrieval (IR) and Geographical Information Science (GIScience) resulting in research and systems development that benefits from the fusion of text-based methods for information extraction, natural language processing, indexing and search with GIS methods for spatial data management, analysis and visualization.
The workshop invites contributions on the following topics, and other research related to GIR:
? Detection, disambiguation and geocoding of geographical references in text;
? User needs for geographic search;
? Classification of web documents and social media with regard to their geographic foci;
? Interpretation of spatial natural language in documents and queries;
? Extraction of geographically-specific facts and events from text documents and social media;
? Spatial and spatio-temporal indexing of documents and other media objects;
? Modelling, construction and integration of ontologies, gazetteers and geographic thesauri;
? Reasoning with geo-spatial facts for purposes of information retrieval;
? Geographical query interfaces for search on the web;
? Geographic question / answering systems;
? Geographic search engine architectures;
? Relevance ranking of geographical information;
? Evaluation methods for geographic search.
We invite both long papers (8 pages) and short papers (2 pages). Long papers are expected to report on relatively mature research results, while short papers should cover more speculative or early stage research that may stimulate discussion at the workshop.
All submissions will be reviewed by three members of the programme committee and all accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.
Please note that we welcome contributions both from academic researchers and from practitioners working in industry and in public agencies engaged in GIR-related activities.
The workshop programme will ensure opportunity for discussion of the presented papers and of the broader agenda for research in GIR.
Submission procedure
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You should prepare your abstract in accordance with the ACM camera-ready instructions (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-t...) and submit it using the EasyChair system (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gir14) by 29th August 2014. Decisions on acceptance will be announced by 15th September 2014.
Camera ready versions of accepted papers to be submitted by 29th September 2014.
At least one author of accepted papers will be required to register for the workshop before the paper is published in the ACM Digital Library, and to present the paper at the workshop.
Please note that attendance at the workshop also requires registration for the main ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS conference (http://sigspatial2014.sigspatial.org) in addition to registering for the workshop.
Further details of the workshop can be found at
http://www.geo.uzh.ch/~rsp/gir14/
Please forward this message to anyone you think may have an interest in the workshop.
With best wishes,
Ross Purves (ross.purves-AT-geo.uzh.ch) and Chris Jones (c.b.jones-AT-cs.cf.ac.uk)