Measuring Effectiveness of Geographic IR Systems in Digital Libraries - Evaluation Framework and Case Study

Common search engines process users’ queries (i.e., information needs) by retrieving documents from pre-built term-based indexes. For digital libraries, such approaches are limited regarding particular contexts, such as specialized collections (e.g., cultural heritage collections) or specific retrieval criteria (e.g., multidimensional criteria). In this paper, we consider Information Retrieval systems exploiting geographic dimensions: spatial, temporal, and topical dimensions. Our contribution is twofold as we propose a Geographic Information Retrieval system evaluation framework and test the following hypothesis: combining spatial and temporal dimensions along with the topical dimension improves the effectiveness of Information Retrieval systems.