Geo-Spatio-Temporal Ontology for GIR on the Web

@ 31st European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2009)International audienceRetrieval of geographically-referenced information on the Web is now a common activity. One of the techniques for retrieving geographic information is processing queries. Seven types of queries are introduced by using questions beginning with Where, Which, What, When and How. In order to process the queries related to a geographic object in the real world, the approach proposed is based on a retrieval strategy that uses four types of matching: spatial, temporal, geographic and concepts using the ontology exploration. At the heart of this approach is a geo-spatio-temporal ontology. Our contribution consists of three parts. The first one is define seven types of queries to be used in the approach of Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) on the web. Then, the second part is integrating the temporal information in the approach of GIR on the web. And the third one is a geo-spatio-temporal ontology to represent the geographic object with its spatio-temporal features. Finally, we present case study to show the exploration of the geo-spatio-temporal ontology correspondent to two queries