Different tools for handling Geographic Information Retrieval problems

Usually in natural language several amounts of geographic references are found, this comes with the common necessity of giving a context with time and location details. Considering these locational semantics, user queries may be satisfied in a more accurate way. In this work a geo-ontology is built for identifying geographic terms. A toponym disambiguation algorithm is proposed for assigning to a place name its corresponding location. The importance of geographic terms in documents is determined by means of a weighting strategy, that is also used to compare geographic contents and to provide a ranking of results. It is also provided a technique for combining a standard textual ranking and the obtained geographic ranking. Final results are evaluated using GeoCLEF test collection and baseline techniques.