The Geospatial Web

Marc Wick • Torsten Becker

Internet users are flooded with information and are thankful for help in categorizing and visualizing textual content. Geographical categorization is one of the most important criterion for filtering, grouping and prioritizing information as users are naturally more interested in local information. We describe a way to extract geographical information from textual content using natural language processing, and we display the information within a geographical context on maps and satellite images. Using the widely supported RSS format as the input format, this approach allows us to process content from nearly all online news sites and blogs.