Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Institute of Statistical Studies and Research - Department of Computer and Information Science

Geographic information is one of the most important and common types of information in human society. There is an explosive growth of Arabic documents and digital resources which contain information related to geographic locations in Egypt. In the era of information explosion, information retrieval (IR) tools, such as search engines, are the main tools people use to quickly find the information they need. Typical keyword based search engines still handle user's queries which contain geographic terms by traditional information retrieval approaches. These engines only return the documents that include places names as words not as geographic locations. They also do not retrieve other documents that are geographically associated with that place, namely that refer to places in the proximity of the subject place, or are contained within it. This led to the need for a geographic information retrieval system, particularly working on the Egyptian geographic locations in Arabic documents and user's Arabic queries, to retrieve the relevant information user seeks to know

Issued also as CD