An integrated framework for retrieving and analyzing geographic information in web pages

Most of the information stored in web pages contains geographic context, such as place names, address, and coordinates. Such geographic information often contains great values and is worth retrieving and analyzing. Traditional search engine is limited in its capability of extracting meaningful geographic messages from mass of unstructured and textual source. Even with the retrieved geographic information, specific systems are still needed to show the spatial distributions of such data. This paper presents an integrated framework which can retrieve and analyze geographic information in web pages. This framework integrates the following core functions: geographic information retrieval; geocoding; spatial analysis and statistical analysis. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework by employing it to retrieve and analyze the geographic information from a particular website.