Characteristics of geographic information needs

A Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) system for answering geographic queries has to cope with various information needs, which have a wide range of contexts and implicit requirements. A user, for example, who is looking for a place to spend his or her holidays certainly has a different understanding of distance than a user looking for a bar in the city he or she lives in. To get a better understanding of geographic information needs and their implications for GIR systems, we analysed real world (geographic) queries with regard to different facets of geographic references in queries. The results of this analysis are presented in this paper, the aim of which was a classification of the geographic aspects of information needs. We present empirical results and line out possible classification criteria, which could be helpful in designing GIR systems that are able to consider different semantics of geographic references in queries.