DCbot: Finding Spatial Information on the Web

The WWW provides an overwhelming amount of information, which – spatially indexed – can be a valuable additional data source for location-based applications. By manually building a spatial index, only a fraction of the available resources can be covered. This paper introduces a system for the automatic mapping of web pages to geographical locations. Our web robot uses several sets of domain specific keywords, lexical context rules, that are automatically learned, and a hierarchical catalogue of geographical locations that provides exact geographical coordinates for locations. Spatially indexed web pages are used to construct Geographical Web Portals, which can be accessed by different location-based applications. In addition, we present experimental results demonstrating the quantity and the quality of automatically indexed web pages.