Quick note on Frankenplace, a cool search tool that displays the geographic distribution of documents that match the user's query as a heatmap. Details of how the tool works are given in:
B. Adams, G. McKenzie, and M. Gahegan (2015) Frankenplace: Interactive Thematic Mapping for Ad Hoc Exploratory Searching. 24th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2736277.2741137At the heart of the method is a discrete global grid that divides the world up into small areas of the same size. Topics are then geographically indexed, so that when a user searches, say, for "ebola", areas relevant to that query are highlighted (in this case, areas in Africa). It's striking example of querying data geographically, and one which I hope to explore further in the context of BHL and BioStor.
Update
I've put some notes on various discrete global grid systems in a repo on GitHub: RDF and discrete global grid systems.
