Systems and methods of geographical text indexing
First Claim
1. A method of processing a document, the method comprising:
- identifying a plurality of one or more geospatial references within the document; and
for each identified geospatial reference of the plurality of geospatial references;
associating a geographical location with the identified geospatial reference, the geographical location being represented by a set of coordinates of a selected coordinate system;
generating a hierarchical coordinate representation of the set of coordinates;
generating a geographic text string based on the hierarchical coordinate representation, wherein the geographic text string can be retrieved by a query posed in a generic query style; and
associating the geographic text string with the identified geospatial reference.
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Abstract
A method of processing a document, the method involving: identifying a plurality of one or more geospatial references within the document; and for each identified geospatial reference of the plurality of geospatial references: (1) associating a geographical location with the identified geospatial reference, the geographical location being represented by a set of coordinates of a selected coordinate system; (2) generating a geographical text string that encodes the geographical location, wherein generating involves the geographical text string may involve interleaving the coordinates to form a hierarchical representation; and (3) associating the geographic text string with the identified geospatial reference.
181 Citations
29 Claims
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1. A method of processing a document, the method comprising:
identifying a plurality of one or more geospatial references within the document; and
for each identified geospatial reference of the plurality of geospatial references;
associating a geographical location with the identified geospatial reference, the geographical location being represented by a set of coordinates of a selected coordinate system;
generating a hierarchical coordinate representation of the set of coordinates;
generating a geographic text string based on the hierarchical coordinate representation, wherein the geographic text string can be retrieved by a query posed in a generic query style; and
associating the geographic text string with the identified geospatial reference. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)
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13. A method of processing a document, said method comprising:
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identifying a plurality of one or more geospatial references within the document; and
for each identified geospatial reference of the plurality of geospatial references;
associating a geographical location with that identified geospatial reference, said geographical location being represented by a set of coordinates of a selected coordinate system;
determining a confidence level for that associated geographical location;
encoding both the geographical location and the confidence level for that identified geospatial reference as a geographic text string; and
associating the geographic text string with the identified geospatial reference. - View Dependent Claims (14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21)
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22. A method of processing a set of documents, the method comprising:
for each document in the set of documents, identifying a plurality of one or more geospatial references within that document; and
for each identified geospatial reference of the plurality of geospatial references within that document;
associating a geographical location with the identified geospatial reference, said geographical location being represented by a set of coordinates of a selected coordinate system;
determining a confidence level for the associated geographical location;
encoding the geographical location and its confidence level into a geographic text string; and
associating the geographic text string with the identified geospatial reference. - View Dependent Claims (23, 24, 25)
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26. A method of constructing a text search query for identifying among a plurality of documents those documents that contain geospatial references that are associated with a geographic location, said method comprising:
receiving an identification of said geographical location;
in response to receiving said specification, representing said geographical location as a set of coordinates; and
generating a geographical text string from the set of geographical coordinates by interleaving the coordinates of the set of coordinates for said geographical location. - View Dependent Claims (27, 28)
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29. A method of utilizing multiple different search engines to construct geographically constrained searches, the method comprising:
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generating a plurality of specially formatted hierarchical strings;
sending the plurality of specially formatted strings to a plurality of search engines, wherein each of the search engines has indexed documents augmented with at least one specially formatted hierarchical string; and
upon receiving responses from the plurality of search engines, generating one or more result layers.
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Specification