Geographic information retrieval (GIR) or geographical information retrieval systems are search tools for searching the Web, enterprise documents, and mobile local search that combine traditional text-based queries with location querying, such as a map or placenames. Like traditional information retrieval systems, GIR systems index text and information from structured and unstructured documents, and also augment those indices with geographic information. The development and engineering of GIR systems aims to build systems that can reliably answer queries that include a geographic dimension, such as "What wars were fought in Greece?" or "restaurants in Beirut".[1] Semantic similarity and word-sense disambiguation are important components of GIR.[2] To identify place names, GIR systems often rely on natural language processing[3] or other metadata to associate text documents with locations. Such georeferencing, geotagging, and geoparsing tools often need databases of location names, known as gazetteers.[4][5][6][7]
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