The 5th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval will be held at CIKM 2008 on the 29th and 30th of October in Napa Valley. This workshop will address all aspects of Geographic Information Retrieval - that is the provision of methods to identify geographic scope, retrieve and relevance rank documents or other resources from both unstructured and partially structured collections on the basis of queries specifying both theme and geographic scope.

Please contact one of us if you require further information:
Ross Purves, University of Zurich
Chris Jones, Cardiff University


Theme

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together the growing community of researchers and practitioners working in the field of geographic information retrieval to discuss further progress within the field and potential future research strands. Examples of topics that are particularly relevant include, but are not confined to:

* user needs and studies for geographic search;
* architectures for geographic search engines;
* spatial indexing of documents and images;
* extraction of geographical context from documents and geo-datasets;
* geographical annotation techniques for geo-referenced documents and images;
* design, construction, maintenance and access methods for geographical ontologies, gazetteers and geographical thesauri;
* geographical query interfaces for the web and geo-spatial libraries;
* geographic information question/ answering services;
* dealing with natural language in geographic information retrieval;
* visualising of the results of geographic searches;
* relevance ranking for geographical search; and
* evaluation of the results of geographical search.

We invite the submission of papers of up to 8 pages for presentation as long papers (30 minutes) and 2 page short abstracts reporting on work in progress for short presentations (15 minutes). All submissions will be reviewed by three members of the program committee, and all accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Important dates

Please note the tight turn around time between the decisions being distributed to authors and camera-ready versions of papers being due. It is important that you are able to meet these deadlines, to ensure that your paper appears in the workshop proceedings.

* Deadline for submission: July 15th 2008
* Decisions to authors: August 10th 2008
* Camera ready versions ready: August 15th 2008