Technology Integration around the Geographic Information: A State of the Art

One of the elements that have popularized and facilitated the use of geographical information on a variety of computational applications has been the use of Web maps; this has opened new research challenges on different subjects, from locating places and people, the study of social behavior or the analyzing of the hidden structures of the terms used in a natural language query used for locating a place. However, the use of geographic information under technological features is not new, instead it has been part of a development and technological integration process. This paper presents a state of the art review about the application of geographic information under different approaches: its use on location based services, the collaborative user participation on it, its contextual-awareness, its use in the Semantic Web and the challenges of its use in natural languge queries. Finally, a prototype that integrates most of these areas is presented

Dynamically Personalizing Search Results for Mobile Users

International audienceWe introduce a novel situation-aware approach to personalize search results for mobile users. By providing a mobile user with appropriate information that dynamically satisfies his interests according to his situation, we tackle the problem of information overload. To build situation-aware user profile we rely on evidence issued from retrieval situations. A retrieval situation refers to the spatio-temporal context of the user when submitting a query to the search engine. A situation is represented as a combination of geographical and temporal concepts inferred from concrete time and location information by some ontological knowledge. User's interests are inferred from past search activities related to the identified situations. They are represented using concepts issued from a thematic ontology. We also involve a method to maintain the user's interests over his ongoing search activity and to personalize the search results