Extraction and exploration of spatio-temporal information in documents

Abstract

In the past couple of years, there have been significant advances in the areas of temporal information retrieval (TIR) and geographic information retrieval (GIR), each focusing on extracting and utilizing temporal and geographic information, respectively, from documents for search and exploration tasks. Interestingly, there is only little work that combines models, techniques and applications from these two areas to support scenarios and applications where temporal and geographic information in combination provide interesting meaningful nuggets in document exploration tasks, such as visualizing a chronological sequence of events with their locations. In this paper, we present an approach that combines the two areas of TIR and GIR. Using temporal and geographic information extracted from documents and recorded in temporal and geographic document profiles, we show how co-occurrences of such information are determined and spatio-temporal document profiles are computed. Such profiles then provide the basis for a variety of document search and exploration tasks, such as visualizing the sequences of events on a map. We present a prototypical implementation of our system and demonstrate the effectiveness of combining GIR and TIR in the context of document exploration tasks.