Spatial decision support in the pedagogical area: Processing travel stories to discover itineraries hidden beneath the surface

Abstract

Local cultural heritage documents are characterized by contents strongly attached to a territory (i.e. Geographical references). Numerous corpora of such local documents become available and a challenging task is to process them automatically in order to retrieve and to make explicit the geographical information that they contain. The research reported in this paper aims at developing a toolset that teachers could use, first to retrieve travel stories from these corpora, and then to study the itineraries reported in these travel stories. To provide an adequate support to teachers, we propose two computational models from which we have built a Geographical Information Retrieval toolset in tune with travel stories characteristics. The paper demonstrates that these quite simple computational models are well fitted to process automatically (at discourse level) travel stories and to make explicit the geographical itineraries reported in such texts.