Geographic information retrieval (GIR) or geographical information retrieval is the augmentation of information retrieval with geographic metadata.

Information retrieval generally views documents as a collection or `bag' of words. In contrast, geographic information retrieval requires a small amount of semantic data to be present (namely a location or geographic feature associated with a document). Because of this it is common in GIR to separate the text indexing and analysis from the geographic indexing. GIR systems can commonly be broken down into the following stages: GeoTagging, text and Geographic indexing, data storage, geographic relevance ranking (wrt a geographic query) and browsing results (commonly with a map interface).

GIR systems
GIR involves extracting and resolving the meaning of locations in unstructured text. This is known as Geoparsing. After identifying location references in text, a GIR system must index this information for search and retrieval.

Information retrieval (IR) is a broad and interdisciplinary research field including information indexing, relevance rankings, search engines, evaluation measures such as recall and precision, as well as robust information carriers and efficient storage. In its broadest definition, information retrieval is concerned with finding relevant information based on a users query. Geographic information retrieval (GIR) adds space and sometimes time as dimensionsto the classical retrieval problem. For instance, a query for pubs in the historic center of Munster requires a thematic and a spatial matching between the data and the users query. According to Jones and Purves, GIR considers the following steps. First, the geographic references have to be recognized and extracted from the users query or a document using methods such as named entity recognition and geo-parsing. Second, place names are not unique and the GIR system has to decide which interpretation is intended by the user. Third, geographic references are often vague; typical examples are vernacular names (historic center) and fuzzy geographic footprints. In case of the pub query, the GIR system has to select the correct boundaries of the historic center. Fourth, and in contrast to classical IR, documents also have to be indexed according to particular geographic regions. Finally, geographic relevance rankings extend existing relevance measures with a spatial component. The ranking of instances does not only depend on thematic aspects, e.g., the pubs, but also on their location, e.g., their distance to the historic center of M unster.