Significant amounts of information available today contain references to places on earth. Traditionally such information has been held as structured data and was the concern of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). However, increasing amounts of data in the form of unstructured text are available for indexing and retrieval that also contain spatial references. This monograph describes the field of Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) that seeks to develop spatially-aware search systems and support user’s geographical information needs. Important concepts with respect to storing, querying and analysing geographical information in computers are introduced, before user needs and interaction in the context of GIR are explored. The task of associating documents with coordinates, prior to their indexing and ranking forms the core of any GIR system, and different approaches and their implications are discussed. Evaluating the resulting systems and their components, and different paradigms for doing so continue to be an important area of research in GIR and are illustrated through a number of examples. The article concludes by setting out a range of future challenges for research in this field.

当今可获得的大量信息包含了对地球各个地方的引用。传统上，此类信息已作为结构化数据保存，并且是地理信息系统（GIS）关心的问题。但是，越来越多的非结构化文本形式的数据可用于也包含空间参考的索引和检索。该专着描述了地理信息检索（GIR）领域，该领域旨在开发空间感知的搜索系统并支持用户的地理信息需求。在探讨用户需求和GIR上下文中的交互之前，介绍了有关在计算机中存储，查询和分析地理信息的重要概念。在索引和排名之前，将文档与坐标相关联的任务是任何GIR系统的核心，讨论了不同的方法及其含义。评估所得的系统及其组件以及执行此操作的不同范例仍然是GIR研究的重要领域，并通过许多示例进行了说明。文章最后总结了该领域研究的一系列未来挑战。