Search Done Right

Providing useful search results is often not just a matter of displaying textual content but has grown to include graphics, audio, video and more recently mapped views of search results. This is useful for applications that focus on specific location information such as office branches and retail outlets in addition to applications centered on geographic regions. This feature is often referred to as geomapping, which is the presentation of data in digital maps.

In order to provide a flexible and complete geomapping search application, the software must provide the following capabilities:

• Some data has location information as metadata associated with the document. If this is not the case, there may be a need to pull locations out of unstructured data such as MS Word files. The method for doing this is to use a process called entity extraction which allows metadata to be pulled out of unstructured content during the crawling process based on pattern matching criteria. Specifically the GATE extraction is particularly useful for the difficult challenge of recognizing location information within unstructured documents.
• Geocoding is the process of finding associated geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) from other geographic data such as address, point of interest (e.g. airport location), or
• Reverse geocoding is the opposite: finding an associated textual location such as a street address, from geographic coordinates.
• Ability to integrate a mapped location (latitude and longitude) with a visual map of the location. Often a search vendor will integrate with third party services to provide this including Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth.
• Finally, the ability to pull in user location information to provide personalization of results. For example, promoting and spotlighting events that are within a 20 mile radius of the end user’s home address.

Specific examples of geomapping use in search results includes the USGS national biological information web site where you can find push pin icons for geomappings such as invasive plants.  The US federal government citizens’ portal also has geomapping included in search results that reference a specific address.

So the next time you type “Where’s Waldo” in your search box, you should get more than just a reference to a puzzle with a man dressed in a red and white striped shirt and bobble hat. You should also get geomapping information.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.