In the last decade, the availability of on-line resources, and also the number of users accessing those resources, has grown exponentially. The information retrieval process, which aims at the improvement of the access to such resources, has been the focus of interest of many researchers. The presence of geographic data in these repositories of information is surprisingly high (for example, note that most of the web pages about business contain information about the locations of their offices). In order to properly manage this geographic data, the information retrieval process has been extended using architectures, data structures, and other techniques developed by the GIS community. This has meant the beginning of a new research field called Geographic Information Retrieval. In this chapter, the authors present a study of the state-of-the-art of this new field, and they also highlight the main open problems that will concentrate efforts during the next years.
A Fun Application of Compact Data Structures to Indexing Geographic Data