Interactive Exploration of Geographic Regions with Web-based Keyword Distributions

Abstract

The most common and visible use of geographic information retrieval (GIR) today is the search for specific points of interest that serve an information need for places to visit. However, in some planning and decision making processes, the interest lies not in specific places, but rather in the makeup of a certain region. This may be for tourist purposes, to find a new place to live during relocation planning, or to learn more about a city in general. Geospatial Web pages contain rich spatial information content about the geo-located facilities that could characterize the atmosphere, composition, and spatial distribution of geographic regions. But the current means of Web-based GIR interfaces only support the sequential search of geo-located facilities and services individually, and limit the end users on abstracted view, analysis and comparison of urban areas. In this work we propose a system that abstracts from the places and instead generates the makeup of a region based on extracted keywords we find on the Web pages of the region. We can then use this textual fingerprint to identify and compare other suitable regions which exhibit a similar fingerprint. The developed interface allows the user to get a grid overview, but also to drill in and compare selected regions as well as adapt the list of ranked keywords.