Metadata extraction and indexing for map search in web documents.

In academic scientific articles, maps are widely used to provide the related geographic information and to give readers a visual understanding of the document content. As more digital documents containing maps become accessible on the Web, there is a growing demand for a Web search system to provide users with tools to retrieve documents based on the information available within a document's maps. In this paper, we design methods and algorithms to extract, identify, and index maps from academic and scientific documents in digital libraries. Experimental results show that our approach can accurately locate maps and significantly improve the retrieve quality for maps in digital documents.