The semantics of place-related questions

Abstract

The trend to equip information systems with question-answering capabilitiesraises the design problem of deciding which questions a system should be able to answer.Typical solutions build on mining human conversations or logs from similar systems forquestion patterns. For the case of questions about geographic places, we present a complementaryapproach, showing how to derive possible questions from an ontology of spatialinformation and a classification of place facets. We argue that such an approach reducesthe inherent and substantial data bias of current solutions. At a more general level, weprovide a novel understanding of spatial questions and their role in designing and usingspatial information systems.