To date, use of the full potential of geo-information is not often applied in the daily practice of policy makers. The main questions explored by this research are: Why is geo-information not widely used in policy and how can this be improved? A conceptual framework was developed to evaluate the use of geo-information. For five cases, the use of geo-information was evaluated by means of this fr...

Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) in an attempt to improve relevance by taking geographic information in textual documents into account. We describe out experiments carried out at the GeoCLEF 2007 evaluation [1] that investigate further the role of geo-filtering based re-ranking and query expansion with geographic terms. Our main findings are that manual query expansion with geo-terms is m...

We have recently been witnessing the growing establishment of map-centered web-based geo-portals on national, regional and local levels. However, a particular issue with these geo-portals is that each instance has been implemented in different ways in terms of design, usability, functionality, interaction possibilities, map size and symbologies. In this paper, we try to tackle these shortcoming...

Geographic information services (geo-services) are gaining popularity as an efficient and costeffective framework for integrating geo-information systems, within and between enterprises, to enhance enterprise business processes. Geo-services can be chained dynamically to create customised geo-information and value-added services and therefore offer a business opportunity for disparate partners ...

background: heavy metal pollution in the sediment of the yellow river draws wide attention in the recent years. the yellow river wetland nature reserve of zhengzhou is one of the major wetlands of the river and located at the beginning of the lower reach. in this article, we aimed to investigate the degree and the sources of the metal pollution in the reserve. methods: metals as cu, pb, cr, cd ...

A Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) model is defined and the architecture of a GIR system, named Geo-Finder, is described. The GIR system is constituted by two main modules. The geo-indexing module applies bipolar criteria to automatically identify the geo-reference focus (footprint) of textual documents. The geo-retrieval module applies a context dependent matching function to evaluate qu...