Adding geographic scopes to web resources

Many web pages are rich in geographic information and primarily relevant to geographically limited communities. However, existing IR systems only recently began to offer local services and largely ignore geo-spatial information. This paper presents our work on automatically identifying the geographical scope of web documents, which provides the means to develop retrieval tools that take the geographical context into consideration. Our approach makes extensive use of an ontology of geographical concepts, and includes a system architecture for extracting geographic information from large collections of web documents. The proposed method involves recognising geographical references over the documents and assigning geographical scopes through a graph ranking algorithm. Initial evaluation results are encouraging, indicating the viability of this approach. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.