Spatial Information Management within Digital Libraries

Local cultural heritage document collections are characterized by contents strongly attached to a territory and its land history. Our contribution aims at enhancing such a content retrieval process efficiently each time a query includes geographic criteria. We propose a unified model for a formal representation of geographic information. This geographic model allows spatial features to be described independently of their representation mode (textual, graphical) in the documents. We have developed a prototype implementing geographic information extraction (IE) and geographic information retrieval (IR) processes. We process geographic IE with semantic techniques combined to classic IE approaches. Then, we implemented geographic IR with intersections researching algorithms: these algorithms search for all geocoded entities in the documents collections indexes which intersect any entity in the user´s request. This paper focuses on IR and visualization proposals relying on the geospatial characteristics of cultural heritage corpora.