Distributed Ranking Methods for Geographic Information Retrieval

Geographic Information Retrieval is concerned with retrieving documents in response to a spatially related query. This paper addresses the ranking of documents by both textual and spatial relevance. To this end, we introduce distributed ranking, where similar documents are ranked spread in the list instead of consecutively. The effect of this is that documents close together in the ranked list have less redundant information. We present various ranking methods, efficient algorithms to implement them, and experiments to show the outcome of the methods.