ICIN 2015 - 9th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval

This is the first call for papers for the 9th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR'15), to be
held on 26th and 27th November 2015 at the Institut Geographique National (IGN) in Paris. The workshop
continues the successful series of workshops held 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 of social media such as micro-blogs and tagged images. 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 spati!
al 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 of 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 (10 pages) and short papers (2 pages). Long papers are expected to report on
relatively mature research results, while short papers may also 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 we plan to publish
accepted papers 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 two day 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 paper 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=gir15).
The deadline for submission is 18th September 2015.
Decisions on acceptance will be announced by 3rd October 2015.
Camera ready versions of accepted papers to be submitted by 17th October 2015.
At least one author of accepted papers will be required to register for the workshop before the paper is
published, and to present the paper at the workshop.
Further details of the workshop can be found at
http://www.geo.uzh.ch/~rsp/gir15/