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Abstract
The relevance of geographic information has become an emerging problem in geographic information science due to an enormous increase in volumes of data at high spatial, temporal, and semantic resolution, because of ever faster rates of new data capturing. At the same time, it is not clear whether the concept of relevance developed in information science and implemented for document-based information retrieval can be directly applied to this new, highly dynamic setting. In this study, we analyze the criteria users apply when judging the relevance of geographic entities in a given mobile usage context. Two different experiments have been set up in order to gather users' opinions on a set of possible criteria, and their relevance judgements in a given scenario. The importance ascribed to the criteria in both experiments clearly implies that a new concept of relevance is required when dealing with geographic entities instead of digital documents. This new concept of ‘Geographic Relevance’ is highly dependent on personal mobility and user's activity, whose understanding may in turn be refined by the assimilation of ‘Geographic Relevance’ itself.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge Omar Alonso, Paul Crease, Sara I. Fabrikant, Stefano Mizzaro, and Christoph Schlieder whose collaboration has given a great contribution to this paper. We also thank all the members of the GIScience Center of the University of Zurich for the valuable comments and numerous discussions.
Notes
1. As ‘geographic entity’, we refer to individual physical entities (or features) in the real world. GR does not aim to assess the relevance of digital documents, unlike Geographic Information Retrieval. Moreover, GR does not aim to assess the relevance, rank, evaluate the quality, or evaluate the fitness for use of entire spatial datasets.