Geographic Information Extraction and Retrieval

Dear Colleagues,

Increasing amounts of unstructured data, in the form of text or multimedia contents, are being made available for indexing, retrieval, and analysis. These include various kinds of documents, such as news articles, scientific publications, or even informal messages on social-media platforms like Twitter. Most of these data also contain geospatial references, associating topics, things, or events to locations. However, the effective analysis and use of these data involves many important technical and methodological challenges.

Handling symbolic spatial, temporal, and topical references (e.g., associations to place names through natural language qualifiers such as “near”) involves a fusion of information retrieval and content analysis methods. The analysis of unstructured contents is generally supported by multimedia processing and natural language processing methods. On the other hand, methods from the toolset of geographical information systems can analyze numeric representations of spatial and/or temporal information (e.g., georeferenced coordinates). In recent years, the combination of the aforementioned areas/techniques has already resulted in several advancements related to the analysis of geospatial references in unstructured contents. However, several challenges and opportunities for improvement still persist, particularly in the context of recent developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

For this Special Issue, we invite the community of professionals and researchers interested in the fields of geographic information extraction, retrieval, and related applications to submit their work. The scope of submissions includes but is not limited to, the following topics:

1. Corpus collection, preparation, and annotation:
   1. Identification and annotation of resources (e.g., text collections, images, videos, and associated metadata);
   2. Construction, modeling, and the use of ontologies, gazetteers, and thesauri for geographic information extraction and retrieval;
   3. Data models and representation schema for spatial and spatiotemporal (unstructured/semistructured) data;
   4. Corpus linguistics methods for geographical text analysis.
2. Geographic information extraction, indexing, and retrieval:
   1. Analysis of geospatial language and geospatial semantics;
   2. Geoparsing and geocoding unstructured contents (e.g., text documents, images, user queries, etc.);
   3. Spatio-textual data indexing and ranked retrieval methods;
   4. User interfaces for geographic information extraction and retrieval.
3. Applications for geographic information extraction and retrieval:
   1. Industrial applications (e.g., tourism, media access and retrieval, etc.);
   2. Research applications (e.g., digital humanities, computational social sciences, etc.);
   3. Gold standards and in-domain evaluation.

Prof. Bruno Martins
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.