290061 PS Principles and Methods of Application Development - Geographic Information Retrieval (2023W)

The size, modality, and source of information about any place or region in the world are constantly changing. To support a wide variety of downstream tasks such as geographic question answering, geographic information retrieval (GIR) provides us with an approach of accessing, searching, indexing, and integrating geographic information. Applications related to GIR include the construction of gazetteers, Web search engines, location-based recommendation services, and so forth.

The course will cover GIR’s core concepts, techniques and challenges, such as the ambiguity of place names, topological relations, georeferencing, spatial indexing and ranking, and user interface development. Through literature review and Python-based practical exercises, students will also learn how to query structured data from geographic databases, how to geoparse unstructured texts to extract location references, and geospatial semantic analysis and interactive geo-visualization with retrieved information.