GIR experiments with Forostar

In this paper we present Forostar, our GIR system. Forostar augments a traditional IR VSM approach with geographic information. We detail our placename disambiguation and geographic relevance ranking methods, as well as how textual and geographic relevance assessments are combined. The paper concludes with an analysis of our results including significance testing where we show our baseline method, in fact, to be best. Finally we identify weaknesses in our approach and ways in which the system could be optimised and improved