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Applying Geographic Information Retrieval

An Experience Report on Developing Local Search for a Developing Country

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Abstract

This article reports on the efforts to establish a research project on a geospatial search engine for the Latin American country of Honduras during the author’s research stay at a local university. Honduras is an interesting example of the challenges for information and knowledge management in developing countries as it combines many of the issues that are otherwise encountered more isolated or with less impact. These include low Web coverage in a low-resource country with limited Web infrastructure, and generally, work in challenging circumstances. The specific focus on geospatial information uncovers further issues that need to be addressed, such as informal addressing schemes or landmark-oriented location references, broad or incorrect locations for places, or insufficient ground truth in databases. While the tangible results of the project stay behind the original goals, several interesting results were achieved, which are condensed here as an experience report.

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Notes

  1. http://hdrstats.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/HND.html.

  2. http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=MDG&f=seriesRowID%3A581.

  3. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2/countries/HN?display=graph.

  4. http://www.latinobarometro.org/.

  5. http://devdata.worldbank.org/ict/hnd_ict.pdf.

  6. http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=179386.

  7. http://www.dmoz.org/.

  8. Such anomalies exist in many countries: http://www.zerogeography.net/2012/10/dominant-wikipedia-language-by-country.html.

  9. http://www.geonames.org/export/codes.html.

  10. http://nutch.apache.org/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank our students Isaac Martinez and Jose Matute of UNITEC—Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, who worked within the research project and provided initial implementations, as well as the academic heads of computer science, the dean of engineering and the research department at tigo.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NTNU—Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Sem Sælands vei 7–9, 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Dirk Ahlers

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  1. Dirk Ahlers
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Correspondence to Dirk Ahlers.

Additional information

This paper was written during the tenure of an ERCIM Alain Bensoussan Fellowship Programme which has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement No. 246016. The research described here was in large parts carried out at UNITEC—Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana, Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

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Ahlers, D. Applying Geographic Information Retrieval. Datenbank Spektrum 14, 39–46 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13222-014-0148-z

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