| 摘要 |
<p>The present invention relates to a system and method for searching, accessing, retrieving, representing and browsing geographic or location related information from the Web (i.e.: HTML documents that describe physical places). More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for automatically searching, retrieving, representing and browsing from the Web a geographic distribution of places where selectable types of resources are located or certain types of services provided (hospitals, bus terminals, historical places, oil-posts, restaurants, hotels, etc ....). These places are located inside regions of different sizes around any reference point of the world. The invention enables a user to select any one of the automatically mapped locations and to browse the information retrieved from the World Wide Web for this location, without any resort to services of specialized geographic information systems or geographic information providers. The system according to the present invention comprises means for tagging each document accessible through the Web with the cartographic coordinates (longitude, latitude and optionally altitude) of the physical location referenced in the document and, optionally, with one or a plurality of attributes of this physical location. The invention also comprises a method for searching and retrieving from the Web the tagged documents from a computer system by means of queries specifying: the cartographic coordinates (longitude and latitude) of a reference location anywhere in the world, the size of the geographic area to search around this reference location, and/or one or several attributes of the locations to search (location type key words) inside that geographic area. <IMAGE></p> |
