地理信息系统文献翻译——1.简介

地理信息被以各种媒体和文件类型记录。有无数的纸质书籍、报告、图像和地图，有计算机数据库和数字地图以及大量包含文本、图像和数字版本的文章、书籍、报告的网页。在过去的几十年里，大多数地理信息系统对于获取地理信息的信息技术着重于数字地图与数据库的结合。只是在最近几年，人们更注重发展用来检索特定地理信息的计算机系统，这种系统可以通过相对非结构化但巨大的资源文件构成万维网（例如拉森1996，麦克理2001，Egenhofer 2002，劳赫等2003，珀维斯等2007）。

因为我们所做的任何事都发生在一定的地域范围内，许多网站上的信息需求都要有一个地理中心就不足为奇了（据估计，13–15%的提交给传统搜索引擎的网站查询都包含一个地名；桑德森和科勒2003，琼斯等的文章）。正是公众在网站上获取地理信息的这种需求，一直是学界内地理信息检索（GIR）发展的最大动力；

许多关于GIR的最新研究可以看作是信息检索（IR）（贝泽·耶茨和Ribeiro-Neto 1999）领域的延伸，甚至研究人员主要来自于信息检索领域而不是地理信息科学研究团体。IR方面的产品目前主要以网络搜索引擎技术为基础，致力于使有关用户以一个短语或关键字的形式来检索Web文件。后一种类型的查询在地理信息系统相反是更正式的常见的方法，它可以使对特定的地理参照数据对象的检索从结构化数据库得到回应查询，可以规定精确的空间约束。为了突出最相关，IR 方法通常以统计方法确定包含查询词语和排名文件的网页。但是对于某些形式的地理搜索，尤其是当寻找共同的资源比较大的地理范围（例如伦敦酒店），这种方法可以但是有许多的限制。

从用户的角度来看，这些限制可以体现在一个失败地区分......

1. Introduction

Geographical information is recorded in a wide variety of media and document types. There are innumerable paper-based books, reports, images and maps, and there are computer databases and digital maps along with vast numbers of Web pages containing text, images and digital versions of articles, books and reports. Over the past few decades, information technology for accessing geographical information has focused on the combination of digital maps and databases that characterize the majority of GIS. It is only in recent years that much attention has been paid to the development of computer systems to retrieve geographically specific information from the relatively unstructured but immense resource of documents that compose the World Wide Web (e.g. Larson 1996, McCurley 2001, Egenhofer 2002, Rauch et al. 2003, Purves et al. 2007).

Because everything we do takes place in a geographical context, it is not surprising that many requirements for information on the Web have a geographical focus (it has been estimated that 13–15% of Web queries submitted to traditional search engines contain a place name; Sanderson and Kohler 2003, Jones et al.this issue). It is this need for public access to geographical information on the Web that has been a major motivation for the growth of the academic field of geographical information retrieval (GIR).

Much current research in GIR can be regarded as an extension of the field of information retrieval (IR) (Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto 1999), and indeed has primarily been undertaken by researchers from......