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In the context of GIS, the enrichment process falls into two basic classes: the semantic enrichment and the spatial one.
For the spatial enrichment it may be operated in the context of the generalization process (Plazanet, 1996). The information to complement the GDB spatial aspect is explored to supply procedural and geometrical knowledge. The latter are to guide the choice of the adequate generalization solution.
Regarding the semantic enrichment, it operates on the semantic data (also referred to as aspatial, descriptive or thematic) stored in the GDB. A set of works may be classified under this data enrichment category.
MetaCarta (2005) may be seen as a bridge between the GIS systems and a set of documents. This is materialized by applying the Geographic Text Search (GTS). GTS allows to link textual documents to geographic entities localized in digital maps to add supplementary data to GDB. GTS is offered as an extension to the GIS ArcGIS.
The GeoNode (Geographic News On Demand Environment) (Hyland et al., 1999) adopts the MITRE’s Alembic system (Day et al., 1997) to carry out the enrichment. Alembic system allows extracting the named entities highlighted in each story. It consists of exploring as input news stories to depict events happening at particular time and place. The GIS ArcView supports GeoNode.