Chris Jones : GIR

Research in Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR)

Everything that we do has some geographical context and there are many sources of information that refer to geographical context. When people search for information on the web it is very common to specify a geographical location. This has spurred the development of geographical and location-aware information retrieval facilities, reflected in the presence of geographically-specialised or so-called "local" search facilities associated with web search engines, as well as the provision of location-sensitive services on mobile devices.

There are many challenging research problems in GIR, concerned for example with recognising and disambiguating geographical terminology in text documents (toponym resolution), interpreting vague and geographical language, building global geographical knowledge bases, indexing documents with respect to both geographical context and textual content, interaction with spatially-aware search devices, and geographical relevance ranking.

Research activity in Cardiff in the field of GIR has focused on :

  • building ontologies of knowledge of geographical places; resulting in the creation of meta-gazetter services that access multiple online sources of geo-data (Smart et al, 2010)
  • the architecture of spatial search engines; resulting in the experimental spatially aware search engine of the SPIRIT project (Purves et al 2007)
  • development of spatio-textual document indexing methods that combine textual and spatial indexing (Vaid et al 2005)
  • acquisition of knowledge of the way on which people refer to places in everyday language; including the development of web mining methods and the creation of an online web questionnaire to elicit knowledge of vernacular place names (Twaroch et al, 2009; Jones et al, 2007; Twaroch et al 2010 )
  • automated understanding of vague spatial langauge such as "near" and "north of"; exploited in interpretation of spatial natural language in photo captions (Hall and Jones, 2011) and in the automated generation of natural language photo captions, in association with a meta-gazetteer
  • exploitation of 3D city models to understand what is in the field of view of camera images (Smart et al 2011)

Research in these fields has been funded by the EU SPIRIT project for which Chris Jones was the project coordinator, the EU TRIPOD project, which has been concerned with photo captioning and by the UK Ordnance Survey-funded Vernacular Geography project (see the on-line survey of People's Place Names.)

The Geographical Information Retrieval series of workshops(GIR'04, GIR'05, GIR'06, GIR'07, GIR'08, GIR'10, GIR'13, GIR'14) have proven to be an important forum for discussion and presentation of recent results in the field.

Publications on Geographical Information retrieval

Tanasescu, V., P.D. Smart, C.B. Jones (2014) Reverse Geocoding for Photo Captioning with a Meta-Gazetteer Proceedings ACM-SIGSPATIAL 2014, Dallas, Texas, USA.

Jones, C.B., R.S. Purves (2014) "GIR'13 workshop report: 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval Orlando, Florida, USA, 5th November 2013". SIGSPATIAL Special 6(1): 14 (2014)

Jones, C.B., Rosin, P.L. and J.D. Slade (2014) “Semantic and geometric enrichment of 3D geo-spatial models with captioned photos and labelled illustrations” Workshop on Vision and Language, pages 62-67. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Coling 2014, Dublin, Ireland.

Van Laere, O., Schockaert, S., Tanasescu, V., Dhoedt, B. and Jones, C. B. (2014). Georeferencing Wikipedia Documents Using Data from Social Media Sources. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 32(3): 12:1-12:32.

G. B. Colombo, M. J. Chorley, V. Tanasescu, S. M. Allen, C. B. Jones, and R. M. Whitaker, “Will You Like this Place? A Tag-Based Place Representation Approach” , in International Workshop on the Impact of Human Mobility in Pervasive Systems and Applications (PerMoby), San Diego, California, USA, 2013.

V. Tanasescu, C. B. Jones, G. B. Colombo, M. J. Chorley, S. M. Allen, and R. M. Whitaker. "The Personality of Venues: Places and the Five-Factors (‘Big Five’) Model of Personality" , in 2013 International Conference on Computing for Geospatial Research & Applications (COM.Geo), 2013.

V. Tanasescu, C. B. Jones, G. B. Colombo, M. J. Chorley, S. M. Allen, and R. M. Whitaker, “Place and Personality,” in 16th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, 2013.

E. M.G. Younis, C.B. Jones, V. Tanasescu, A.I. Abdelmoty (2012) ”Hybrid Geo-Query Methods on the Semantic Web with a Spatially Enhanced Index of Dbpedia”, GIScience, 2012, Columbus, Ohio, LNCS 7478, 340-353.

Alazzawi A., A.I. Abdelmoty and C.B. Jones (2012) “What can I do there? Towards the Automatic Discovery of Place-related Services and Activities” International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 26(2), 345-364.

Hall, M.M., P.D. Smart and C.B. Jones (2011) "Interpreting spatial language in image captions". Cognitive Processing 12(1), pp 67-94.

Smart P.D., J.A.Quinn and C.B. Jones (2011). "City Model Enrichment". ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 66 (2) pp 223-234.

Smart, P.D., C.B. Jones and F.A. Twaroch (2010): 'Multi-Source Toponym Data Integration and Mediation for a Meta-Gazetteer Service', In Proceedings of GIScience 2010, Zurich, Switzerland, Lecture Notes In Computer Science 6292, pp 234-248 [PDF]

Alazzawi, A. N,. A.I. Abdelmoty, C. B. Jones (2010) "An Ontology of Place and Service Types to Facilitate Place-Affordance Geographic Information Retrieval'.In Proceedings of 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, GIR 2010, Zurich, Switzerland, ACM Digital Library. [PDF]

Twaroch, F. and Jones, C. B. (2010): 'A Web Platform for the Evaluation of Vernacular Place Names in Automatically Constructed Gazetteers', In Proceedings of 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, GIR 2010, Zurich, Switzerland, ACM Digital Library.

Ahmed N. Alazzawi, Alia I. Abdelmoty, and Christopher B. Jones (2010). Toward a Common Model and a Markup Language for Personal Gazetteers. ACM HotPlanet 2010 The 2nd ACM International Workshop on Hot Topics in Planet-Scale Measurement, held in cooperation with ACM MobiSys, San Francisco, CA, USA.

Hall, M. M., and C. B. Jones, "Initialising and Terminating Active Contours for Vague Field Crisping", GISRUK 2009, pp. 395-397.

Quinn J., P.D. Smart, C.B. Jones (2009) "3D city registration and enrichment". Proceedings of ISPRS COST Workshop on quality, scale and analysis aspects of city models, Lund, Sweden. Lund, Sweden

Abdelmoty A.I., P.D. Smart, B.A. El-Geresy and C.B. Jones (2009): "Supporting frameworks for the geospatial semantic web", Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases, Lecture Notes In Computer Science Vol. 5644, Springer, pp 355-372. [PDF]

Twaroch F.A., Jones, C.B. and Abdelmoty, A.I. (2009): 'Acquisition of Vernacular Place Footprints from Web Sources' in Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Irwin King (Eds.): "Weaving Services and People on the World Wide Web", Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 195-214 [PDF]

Hall, M. M., A. N. Alazzawi, A. I. Abdelmoty, and C. B. Jones (2009) "Improving the Quality of GPS-based Personal Gazetteers", GI_Forum 2009: Herbert Wichman Verlag, Heidelberg, pp. 53-55.

Twaroch, F., Purves, R. and Jones, C. (2009): 'Stability of Qualitative Spatial Relations between Vernacular Regions Mined from Web Data', In Proceedings of Workshop on Geographic Information on the Internet, Toulouse, France.

Jones, C. B., Abdelmoty, A. I., Smart, P. D., Hall, M. M., Quinn, J., and Twaroch, F. A. (2009). Automated Image Captioning: The TRIPOD project. In Proceedings of Workshop on Geographic Information on the Internet, Toulouse, France, pp. 85-86. [PDF]

Jones C. B., R. S. Purves, P. D. Clough and H. Joho (2008) "Modelling vague places with knowledge from the Web". International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 22(10), pp. 1045 - 1065. [PDF]

Jones C. B. and R. S. Purves (2008) "Geographical information retrieval" (editorial article). International Journal of Geographical Information Science, Vol. 22(3), 219-228.[PDF]

Hall, M.M., C.B. Jones (2008), "Evaluating Field Crisping Methods for Representing Spatial Prepositions", Proceedings of 5th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, GIR 2008, Napa, California, USA, ACM Press, pp. 9-10. [PDF]

Hall, M.M., C.B.Jones (2008), "A Field Based Representation for Vague Areas Defined by Spatial Prepositions", Proceedings of Methodologies and Resources for Processing Spatial Language, Workshop at LREC'2008. [PDF]

Twaroch F.A., Smart, P.D., and Jones, C.B. (2008): 'Mining the Web to Detect Place Names'. Proceedings of 5th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, GIR 2008, Napa, California, USA, ACM Press, pp. 43-44.

Twaroch F.A., Jones, C.B. and Abdelmoty, A.I. (2008): 'Acquisition of a Vernacular Gazetteer from Web Sources'. Workshop on Location on the Web 2008, Locweb 2008, Beijing, China, pp. 61-64. [PDF]

Schockaert, S., P. D. Smart, A. I. Abdelmoty, C. B. Jones (2008) "Mining Topological Relations from theWeb". Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (FlexDBIST), p. 652-656. [PDF]

Purves, R.S., P. Clough, C.B.Jones et al, (2007), "The design and implementation of SPIRIT : a spatially-aware search engine for information retrieval on the internet". International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 21(7), 717-745. [PDF]

Smart P.D., A.I. Abdelmoty, B.A. El-Geresy, Christopher B. Jones (2007), "A Framework for Combining Rules and Geo-ontologies". In M. Marchiori, J. Z. Pan, C. de Sainte Marie (Eds.): Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR 2007, Innsbruck , Austria, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4524, pp.: 133-147. [PDF]

Alazzawi A.N., A.I. Abdelmoty and C.B. Jones (2007), "Spatio-temporal Personalised Web Search". Proc. GIS Research UK 15th Annual Conference (GISRUK-2007), Maynooth, Ireland, pp. 457-459.

Jones C.B. and R. Purves (2006) "GIR'05 2005 ACM workshop on geographical information retrieval". SIGIR Forum 40(1): 34-37.[PDF]

Arampatzis A, M. van Kreveld M., I. Reinbacher , C. B. Jones, S. Vaid, P. Clough, H. Joho, and M. Sanderson (2006) "Web-Based Delineation of Imprecise Regions", Computers Environment and Urban Systems. 30 (4), 436-459. [PDF]

A.I. Abdelmoty, P. D. Smart, C. B. Jones, Gaihua Fu and D. Finch (2005), "A Critical Evaluation of Ontology Languages for Geographical Information Retrieval", Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 16(4), Pages 331-358. [PDF]

Fu, G., C.B. Jones, and A.I. Abdelmoty (2005). 'Ontology-Based Spatial Query Expansion in Information Retrieval'. In On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2005: ODBASE 2005. Agia Napa, Cyprus:Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3761, Springer, 1466-1482 [PDF]

Fu G., Christopher B. Jones, Alia I. Abdelmoty (2005) 'Building a Geographical Ontology for Intelligent Spatial Search on the Web'. Databases and Applications 2005: 167-172. [PDF]

Vaid S., Christopher B. Jones, Hideo Joho, Mark Sanderson (2005) Spatio-textual Indexing for Geographical Search on the Web. 9th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases SSTD 2005, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3633, 218-235. [PDF]

Jones C.B., A.I. Abdelmoty, D. Finch, G. Fu and S. Vaid (2004) The SPIRIT Spatial Search Engine:Architecture, Ontologies and Spatial Indexing. Proc Third International Conference on Geographic Information Science GIScience 2004, Maryland, USA, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3234,125-139. [PDF]

Jones C.B., A.I. Abdelmoty and G. Fu (2003) "Maintaining ontologies for geographical information retrieval on the web", in Meersman, R.; Tari, Z.; Schmidt, D. C. (Eds.) On The Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2003: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE Ontologies, Databases and Applications of Semantics, ODBASE"03, Catania, Italy, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2888, ISBN: 3-540-20498-9 934-951. [PDF]

Jones, C.B, H. Alani, and D. Tudhope, (2003). "Geographical terminology servers - closing the semantic divide", in M.F. Goodchild, M. Duckham and M.F. Worboys (eds) Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Taylor and Francis, pp 201-218. [PDF]

Jones C.B., R. Purves, A. Ruas, M. Sanderson, M. Sester, M.J. van Kreveld, R. Weibel (2002). "Spatial information retrieval and geographical ontologies an overview of the SPIRIT project". SIGIR 2002: Proceedings of the 25th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Tampere, Finland, 387-388. [PDF]

Alani H., C.B. Jones and D.S. Tudhope (2001) 'Voronoi-based region approximation for geographical information retrieval with gazetteers' International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 15(4), 287-306. [PDF]

Jones C.B., H. Alani and D. Tudhope (2001). "Geographical information retrieval with ontologies of place", D. Montello (ed), Spatial Information Theory Foundations of Geographic Information Science, COSIT 2001, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2205, Springer, 323-335. [PDF]

Alani H., C.B. Jones and D.S. Tudhope (2000) 'Associative and Spatial Relationships in Thesaurus-based Retrieval', Proceedings European Conference on Digital Libraries, accepted for publication.

Jones A.G., C.B. Jones and D. Tudhope (1998) 'Intelligent interpretation of terminology for a public access GIS'. Proceedings GIS Research UK (GISRUK98), Edinburgh, pp 11.11-11.15

Jones C.B. (1997) 'Geographical Information Access in Museums'. Editorial for Special Issue of MDA Information 2(3), pp 1-2.

Jones C.B. (1997) 'GIS and Museums', in Geographical Information Access in Museums, MDA Information 2(3), (special issue, edited by C.B. Jones), pp 21-26.

Jones C.B. (1997) ‘Geographical interfaces to museum collections’. Proceedings Fourth International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums ICHIM97, pp 226-236.

Jones C.B., C. Taylor, D. Tudhope, P. Beynon-Davies (1996). 'Conceptual, spatial and temporal referencing of multimedia objects'. Advances in GIS Research II, Proceedings 7th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Delft, Taylor and Francis, pp 2.13-26.

Jones C.B., P. Beynon-Davies, C. Taylor and D.S. Tudhope (1995). 'GIS, hypermedia and historical information access', Information: The Hidden Resource, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of the Museum Documentation Association, Edinburgh, The Museum Documentation Association pp 109-113.

Taylor, C, Tudhope, D, Beynon-Davies, P. (1994) Representation and Manipulation of Conceptual, Temporal and Geographical Knowledge in a Museum Hypermedia System, Proc ACM European Conference on Hypermedia Technology, Edinburgh, 239-244.

Tudhope D, Beynon-Davies P, Taylor C, Jones C (1994) 'Virtual Architecture based on a Binary Relational Model: A Museum Hypermedia Application'. Hypermedia, 6(3), 174-192.