A global process to access documents’ contents from a geographical point of view

Local cultural heritage document repositories are characterized by contents strongly attached to a territory (i.e. geographical references). The user must be able to consider such repositories according to a focus, which takes into account his/her geographical interests, and which allows one to access the relevant document's contents from a geographical point of view.This paper presents the Virtual Itineraries in the Pyrenees (PIV) project. Spatial and temporal core models are proposed to give a formal representation of geographical information. The models take into account the characteristics of heterogeneous human modes of expression: written language and captures of drawings, maps, pictures, etc. Semantic processes have been built to automatically manage the spatial and temporal information from non-structured data. A “back office” prototype, which adds these processes to classic information extraction (IE) approaches, while associating a geographical information retrieval (GIR) service is proposed. This service searches for any links between formal representations of geographic information in document collections, and similar representations in a user's information query. Finally, the paper presents the design work, giving the details of the principles of result visualization and navigation, while proposing a “front office” first implementation of the system.