| Christopher B.Jones | Biography | Research | Publications | [Computer Science Home] |
Christopher Jones, Cardiff University
Alia Abdelmoty, Cardiff University
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. The need to match people's requirement for geographically-specific information with the numerous sources of geographically referenced information has spurred the development of geographical and location-aware information retrieval facilities. This is reflected in the presence of geographically-specialised or so-called "local" search facilities associated with the main web search engines as well as the provision of location-sensitive information services on mobile devices.
There are many challenging research problems to be addressed in order to make geographical and location-aware search facilties genuinely effective. These are concerned for example with determining the geographical context of text documents in which termninology is often vague and ambiguous, 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 activities in Cardiff in the field of geographical information retrieval have focused on :
building ontologies of knowledge of geographical places;
the architecture of spatial search engines;
development of spatio-textual document indexing methods that combine textual and spatial indexing;
acquisition of knowledge of the way on which people refer to places in everyday language, leading to a vernacular geography;
automated understanding of vague spatial langauge such as "near" and "north of";
exploitation of 3D city models to understand what is in the field of view of camera images.
Recently 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 indexing images on the web 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,) have proven to be an important forum for discussion and presentation of recent results in the field.
Publications on Geographical Information retrieval:
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]
Smart, P., Abdelmoty, A.I. and Jones, C.B. (2006). “Visual Editor for Validating Geo-Ontologies in OWL”, Proc. GIS Research UK Conference (GISRUK-2006). Nottingham, UK, pp. 222-226.
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 (1997) 'Geographical Access to Museum Hypermedia Exhibits' MDA Information (Museum Documentation Association), 2(3), 39-41.
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.