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With the rapid growth of social media, textual content is increasingly growing. Unstructured texts are a rich source of latent spatial information. Extracting such information is useful in query processing, geographical information retrieval (GIR), and recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to infer spatial information from salient features of non-spatial nature in text corpora. We propose two methods, namely DCS and RCS, to represent place-based concepts. In addition, two measures, namely the Shannon entropy and the Moran's I, are proposed to calculate the degree of geo-indicativeness of terms in texts. The methodology is compared with a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach to estimate the accuracy improvement. We evaluated the methods on a dataset of rental property advertisements in Iran and a dataset of Persian Wikipedia articles. The results show that our proposed approach enhances the relative accuracy of predictions by about 10% in case of the renting advertisements and by 13% in case of the Wikipedia articles. The average distance error is about 13.3 km for the advertisements and 10.3 km for the Wikipedia articles, making the method suitable to infer the general region of the city in which a property is located. The proposed methodology is promising for inferring spatial knowledge from textual content that lacks spatial terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural heritage (CH) reflects on the history of a society and its traditions and it is treated as the nation's memory and identity. Digitizing and web, beside its benefits, brought some challenges in disseminating and retrieving CH information, which has heterogeneous content varying widely in type and properties yet encompassing rich semantic links. Semantic web technologies, especially ontologies, provide a common understanding inside a domain that helps sharing knowledge and interoperability. They can be very helpful in data modeling for a better information retrieval compared to relational databases as they take into account the semantics of information, guarantee reusability, and make information machine-readable that can offer more flexibility to intelligent services and applications. CH community is one of the first domains to make use semantic web technologies to deal with this issue. CIDOC CRM is the most used and famous ontology in CH domain, which is an ISO standard since 2006. Heritage sites are composed of many points of interest that attract visitors to find out about them. However, information about a particular POI is complex and interconnected with other people, events, and objects. In this paper, we aim to develop a POI-based data model for heritage sites in Iran using concepts from CIDOC CRM integrated with GeoSPARQL, the standard ontology in geospatial field, to incorporate spatial semantics with heritage information. This way the user can freely explore their preferred information about the places they desire. This can make it possible to use the data model for location-based services and applications in heritage sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current metadata schema, internet search engines and databases of scientific literature have an Anglo-American language and cultural bias. While it is possible to catalogue or index non-English, non-Latin script publications and achieve some degree of success in the retrieval of such information, librarians and researchers are often disappointed by inconsistencies in the accuracy of search results for this type of publication and frustrated by the limitations created by the biases embedded in the technology and schema. This paper is the result of a two-year dialog between a Farsi-speaking medical librarian in Iran and an English-speaking metadata librarian in Canada. They present the argument that a metadata schema which incorporates graphical images such as Emoji along with keyword indexing or a controlled vocabulary and new search engines which can make use of the new schema for Boolean searching is a robust potential solution for the difficulties they discussed. While this new information seeking environment that requires both the edition of a graphical facet to metadata schema and new search engines presents the potential to break down significant intercultural barriers, the authors recognize that this undertaking is more than a simple technological or procedural change but would require significant agreement between and work from librarians, standards bodies and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]