On extraction of WWW pages with spatial information for mediating their distribution

Maps are expected to play an important role that interfaces help users search on the WWW. There is much area-based information on the WWW, and there are also many service providers that support such information. The implementation of spatial information sharing services is expected to mediate these contents and services. In developing information mediation services, preparing rich contents for the service is one of the main problems. We implemented an agent, that extracts spatial information and carried out an experiment to extracting spatial information automatically using this agent. The agent extracted 23% of eleven thousand two hundred WWW pages using text address information, which is one type of spatial information. We confirmed the accuracy of the extraction manually, and found there was no noise in this case. This result shows the agent can accurately extract text address information, and is therefore very useful.