A Chinese Geographic Knowledge Base for GIR

In recent years, the rapid development of geographic information system technology and the popularity of geo-location-based mobile information services have made people pay more attention to geography-related information. Thus, the information retrieval and related services based on geographic has a broad application prospects. However, the traditional search engine for the processing of geographic information seems powerless. Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) is a kind of retrieval technique which is concerned with geographic information. A geographic knowledge base (GKB) has a key role in GIR, it can provides support for query disambiguation, query term expansion, relevance ranking, document annotation, and reasoning about geographical concepts. In this paper, we construct a GIR-oriented geographic knowledge base based on Chinese Wikipedia named NCGKB. First, we give the overall structure and design the geographic ontology. On the basis of the ontology and taking advantage of characteristics of Wikipedia pages, three extractors were developed to extract geographic entities, entity attributes and entity relations. For the geographic relation extraction, a geographic relation extraction method based on pattern matching was proposed which can effectively extract relations from content of Chinese Wikipedia. Finally, experimental results verify the effectiveness of the relationship extraction.