Software for studying and enhancing educational uses of geospatial semantics and data

Abstract

Geographically related queries form nearly one-fifth of all queries submitted to the Excite search engine and the most frequently occurring terms are names of places. This paper focuses on digital libraries and extends the basic services of existing library management systems to include new ones that are dedicated to geographic information extraction, retrieval and visualization. We report on some experimentation with these services in order to manage geospatial data within tourist and educational software.

Keywords:

• geography education
• distant places and itineraries
• geographic information retrieval and visualization
• learning environments

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank their colleagues at the LIUPPA Lab (DESI research group) who contributed to this work. We also thank the Aquitaine Region, the Pyrénées Atlantiques department and the Pau agglomeration, for financially supporting this research under grants CRA-20071104037, CG64-20072009 and CDA-20072010.