There is a vast quantity of, typically unstructured, information in text documents and other media that is referenced to geographic space and which is the subject of information search. The discipline of Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) addresses this information demand. It is concerned with the development of methods to gain access to geographically-specific information originating in unstructured and semi-structured media such as text documents and images. The aim is thus to develop information systems that can automatically interpret the geographical terminology and spatial concepts that people use when recording and querying the information and that can retrieve information that is relevant to the user’s geographic information needs. GIR falls at the intersection of Information Retrieval (IR) and Geographical Information Science (GIScience) and focuses particularly on research and systems development for purposes of geo-information extraction, spatio-textual indexing, spatially-oriented information retrieval 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 documents and media objects with regard to their geographic foci;
Interpretation of spatial natural language in documents and queries;
Extraction of geographically-specific facts from text;
Spatial indexing of documents and other media objects and of their information content;
Reasoning with and integration of structured geo-spatial facts for purposes of information retrieval;
Ontologies, gazetteers and geographic thesauri;
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 (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, such that attendance of the workshop can provide direct input into ongoing research.