Interactive Exploration of Geographic Regions with Web-based Keyword Distributions Chandan Kumar University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany chandan.kumar@uni- oldenburg.de Dirk Ahlers NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway dirk.ahlers@idi.ntnu.no Wilko Heuten OFFIS – Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg, Germany wilko.heuten@ofﬁs.de Susanne Boll University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany susanne.boll@uni- oldenburg.de ABSTRACT The most common and visible use of geographic information retrieval (GIR) today is the search for speciﬁc points of inter- est that serve an information need for places to visit. How- ever, in some planning and decision making processes, the interest lies not in speciﬁc places, but rather in the makeup of a certain region. This may be for tourist purposes, to ﬁnd a new place to live during relocation planning, or to learn more about a city in general. Geospatial Web pages contain rich spatial information content about the geo-located facil- ities that could characterize the atmosphere, composition, and spatial distribution of geographic regions. But the cur- rent means of Web-based GIR interfaces only support the sequential search of geo-located facilities and services indi- vidually, and limit the end users on abstracted view, analy- sis and comparison of urban areas. In this work we propose a system that abstracts from the places and instead gener- ates the makeup of a region based on extracted keywords we ﬁnd on the Web pages of the region. We can then use this textual ﬁngerprint to identify and compare other suitable regions which exhibit a similar ﬁngerprint. The developed interface allows the user to get a grid overview, but also to drill in and compare selected regions as well as adapt the list of ranked keywords. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces Keywords Geographic information retrieval, Spatial Web, Geographic regions, Keyword distributions, Visualization, Interaction Presented at EuroHCIR2013. Copyright c  2013 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. 1. INTRODUCTION Geospatial search has become a widely accepted search mode oﬀered by many commercial search engines. Their inter- faces can easily be used to answer relatively simple requests such as “restaurant in Berlin ” on a point-based map inter- face, which additionally gives extended information about entities [1]. A corresponding strong research interested has developed in the ﬁeld of geographic information retrieval, e.g., [2, 17, 15]. However, there are many tasks in which the retrieval of individual pinpointed entities such as facilities, services, businesses, or infrastructure cannot satisfy user’s more complex spatial information needs. To support more complex tasks we propose a new retrieval method based on entities. For example, sometimes the dis- tribution of results on a map can already inform certain views about areas, e.g., a search for “bar” may show a clus- tering of results that can be used for “eyeballing” a region of nightlife even without sophisticated geospatial analysis. However, as users become more used to local search, more complex search types and supporting analysis are desired that enable a combined view onto the underlying data [10]. Exploration of geographic regions and their characterization was found as one of the key desire of local search users in our requirement study [11]. A person who is moving to a new area or city would like to ﬁnd similar neighborhoods or regions with a similar makeup to their current home. It might not even be the concrete entities, but rather the atmo- sphere, composition, and spatial distribution that make up the “feeling” of a neighborhood that best capture the inten- tion of a user. To assess this similarity of regions we propose a spatial ﬁngerprint (query-by-spatial-example) that acts as an abstracted view onto the same point-based data. We also aim to provide new visual tools for the exploration of geographic regions. While the necessary multi-dimensional geospatial data is already available, there is no suitable inter- face to query them, let alone to deal with the multi-criteria complexity. In this paper we describe a visual-interactive GIR system to support the retrieval of relevant geospatial regions and enable users to explore and interact with geospa- tial data. We propose a new query-by-spatial-example in-