Method and apparatus for geographic document retrieval

摘要

A geographic document retrieval method (GDR) can be executed by a computer system to index, retrieve and rank geographical documents. Textual and spatial attributes of geographical documents are indexed separately using inverted index and spatial index, respectively. Spatial attributes of a document are represented as one or more contiguously closed regions of arbitrary shapes. Upon receiving an input query carrying a geographic representation of a location using arbitrary regions, the GDR method retrieves one or more documents by executing an overlap test between arbitrary regions from the query and the arbitrary regions associated with the documents.