We take great pleasure in welcoming you all to the 2nd Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR'05), which this year is being held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.In recent years there has been increasing interest in developing information retrieval tools to access resources on the basis of geographical location. This is reflected in the appearance of geographically-specialised search facilities associated with some of the main web search engines. The subject of geographical information retrieval is still at a relatively early stage of development and there are major research challenges to be addressed. These are concerned for example with determining the geographical context of text documents, building geographical ontologies, indexing documents with respect to both geographical context and textual content, interaction with spatially-aware search devices, and geographical relevance ranking. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together the growing community of researchers and practitioners working in the field of GIR to discuss progress and future research strands. It is a follow up to the very successful GIR workshop held in conjunction with ACM SIGIR 2004.The call for papers resulted in an interesting mix of submissions related to differing aspects of GIR. All papers were reviewed by at least two members of the programme committee. The 12 papers that were selected for presentation provide new insight into the state of the art in GIR and cast new light on the major challenges. We hope that the workshop will succeed not only in its aim of reporting on where we are now, but also on how we in the academic research community can set a distinctive, relevant and above all exciting research agenda for the coming years.
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