U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2006-1279
Published 2006
Online only
By Kenneth J. Lanfear, USGS Retired
Earth-science researchers need the capability to find relevant information by location and topic. Conventional geographic techniques that simply check whether polygons intersect can efficiently achieve a high recall on location, but can not achieve precision for ranking results in likely order of importance to the reader. A spatial overlay ranking based upon how well an object's footprint matches the search area provides a more effective way to spatially search a collection of reports, and avoids many of the problems associated with an "in/out" (True/False) boolean search. Moreover, spatial overlay ranking appears to work well even when spatial extent is defined only by a simple bounding box.
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Open-File Report 2006-1279 [125-KB PDF]
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U.S. Department of the Interior |
U.S. Geological Survey
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