Professor Christopher Jones
Teams and roles for Christopher Jones
Professor of Geographic Information Systems
Overview
I am Professor Geographical Information Systems in the Cardiff School of Computer Science & Informatics with a particular interest in geographical information retrieval (GIR). My current interests in GIR focus on
- modelling the use of vague spatial relational terminology such as ‘near’, ‘at’, and ‘next to’, in order to enable automated interpretation and generation of natural language descriptions of location;
- retrieval of environmental information from social media such as Twitter and Flickr, including observations of particular species of wildlife.
Other current and recent research relates to the use of computer vision methods for identifying features of buildings to support the creation of rich 3D models that are annotated with their architectural features.
I have been co-chair of the workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval since its inception in 2004. I am also co-chair of the workshop Speaking of Location.
I was involved in some of the early initiatives in GIR including leading the EU SPIRIT project on the design of spatially-aware search engines and the development of novel methods for spatio-textual document indexing, place name ontologies (gazetteers) and modelling vague place names with evidence from the web.
Several projects that I have worked on have been in collaboration with the Ordnance Survey. One of these projects in the area of label placement in cartography led to the development, initially at the University of South Wales with Tony Cooke and John McBride, of the Maplex label placement engine that is a module in the ESRI ArcGIS product. Another project led to the development with Florian Twaroch of the web site yourplacenames.com to acquire knowledge of the use of vernacular place names.
I have also worked on and retain interest in various aspects of computer cartography, particularly map generalisation, multi-scale spatial databases, and three-dimensional modelling the geoscientific data.
Publication
2026
- Wijegunarathna, K. I. , Stock, K. and Jones, C. B. 2026. Digital gazetteers: Review and prospects for place name knowledge bases. ACM Computing Surveys 58 (3) 69. (10.1145/3763231)
2025
- Edwards, T. , Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. B. 2025. A hybrid approach for geo-referencing tweets: transformer language model regression and gazetteer disambiguation. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 14 (9) 321. (10.3390/ijgi14090321)
- Wijegunarathna, K. , Stock, K. and Jones, C. B. 2025. Large multi-modal model cartographic map comprehension for textual locality georeferencing. Presented at: 13th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025) Christchurch, New Zealand 26-29 August 2025. Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs). Vol. 346.Leibniz: Schloss Dagstuhl. , pp.1-19. (10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.12)
2024
- Jones, C. B. , Stock, K. and Perkins, S. E. 2024. AI-based discovery of habitats from museum collections. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 39 (4), pp.323-327. (10.1016/j.tree.2024.01.006)
2023
- Aflaki, N. et al., 2023. An empirical study of the semantic similarity of geospatial prepositions and their senses. Spatial Cognition & Computation 23 (2), pp.132-176. (10.1080/13875868.2022.2111683)
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. 2023. Topological data analysis for geographical information science using persistent homology. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 37 (3), pp.712-745. (10.1080/13658816.2022.2155654)
- Sinha, S. et al., 2023. Sarcasm detection in product reviews using textual entailment approach. Presented at: 7th International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Information Seoul, South Korea 15-17 December 2023. NLPIR '23: Proceedings of the 2023 7th International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. Association for Computing Machinery. , pp.310-318. (10.1145/3639233.3639252)
- Stock, K. et al., 2023. The BioWhere Project: unlocking the potential of biological collections data. GI_Forum 11 (1), pp.3-21. (10.1553/giscience2023_01_s3)
2022
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. 2022. A persistent homology model of street network connectivity. Transactions in GIS 21 (1), pp.155-181. (10.1111/tgis.12844)
- Edwards, T. , Jones, C. B. and Corcoran, P. 2022. Identifying wildlife observations on twitter. Ecological Informatics 67 101500. (10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101500)
- Hall, M. M. and Jones, C. B. 2022. Generating geographical location descriptions with spatial templates: a salient toponym driven approach. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 36 (1), pp.55-85. (10.1080/13658816.2021.1913498)
- Liao, R. et al., 2022. Predicting distance and direction from text locality descriptions for biological specimen collections. Presented at: 15th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2022) Kobe, Japan 5-9 September, 2022. Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics. Vol. 240.International Conference on Spatial Information Theory Vol. 4. Liebniz, Germany: Dagstuhl Publishing. , pp.1-15. (10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2022.4)
- Radke, M. A. et al., 2022. Disambiguating spatial prepositions: The case of geo-spatial sense detection. Transactions in GIS 26 (6), pp.2621-2650. (10.1111/tgis.12976)
- Stock, K. et al., 2022. Detecting geospatial location descriptions in natural language text. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 36 (3), pp.547-584. (10.1080/13658816.2021.1987441)
- Stock, K. , Jones, C. B. and Tenbrink, T. 2022. Speaking of location: a review of spatial language research. Spatial Cognition & Computation 22 (3-4), pp.185-224. (10.1080/13875868.2022.2095275)
2021
- Edwards, T. et al. 2021. Passive citizen science: The role of social media in wildlife observations. PLoS ONE 16 (8) e0255416. (10.1371/journal.pone.0255416)
2020
- Jeawak, S. , Jones, C. and Schockaert, S. 2020. Predicting environmental features by learning spatiotemporal embeddings from social media. Ecological Informatics 55 101031. (10.1016/j.ecoinf.2019.101031)
- Jeawak, S. S. , Jones, C. B. and Schockaert, S. 2020. Predicting the environment from social media: a collective classification approach. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 82 (10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2020.101487)
2019
- Jeawak, S. , Jones, C. and Schockaert, S. 2019. Embedding geographic locations for modelling the natural environment using Flickr tags and structured data. Presented at: ECIR 2019: 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval Cologne, Germany 14-18 April 2019. , pp.-.
- Pezzica, C. et al. 2019. Between images and built form: automating the recognition of standardised building components using deep learning. Presented at: 27th CIPA International Symposium “Documenting the past for a better future” Avila, Spain 1-5 September 2019. ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Vol. IV-2.Copernicus. , pp.123-132. (10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-2-W6-123-2019)
2018
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. 2018. Robust tracking of objects with dynamic topology. Presented at: ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems Seattle, Washington, USA 6-9 November 2018. ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. ACM. , pp.428-431. (10.1145/3274895.3274922)
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. B. 2018. Stability and statistical inferences in the space of topological spatial relationships. IEEE Access 6 , pp.18907-18919. (10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2817493)
- Jeawak, S. , Jones, C. and Schockaert, S. 2018. Mapping wildlife species distribution with social media: Augmenting text classification with species names. Presented at: GIScience 2018: 10th International Conference on Geographic Information Science Melbourne, Australia 28-31 August 2018. Published in: Winter, S. , Griffin, A. and Sester, M. eds. 10th International Conference of Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2018). Vol. 114.Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) Dagstuhl, Germany: Schloss Dagstuhl/Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. , pp.34:1-34:6. (10.4230/LIPIcs.GISCIENCE.2018.34)
- Prizeman, O. et al. 2018. How can century-old architectural hierarchies for the design of public libraries be re-interpreted and re-used?. Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development 8 (4), pp.481-494. (10.1108/JCHMSD-08-2017-0051)
- Purves, R. S. et al., 2018. Geographic information retrieval: progress and challenges in spatial search of text. Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 12 (2-3), pp.164-318. (10.1561/1500000034)
- Twaroch, F. A. et al., 2018. Investigating behavioural and computational approaches for defining imprecise regions. Spatial Cognition & Computation (10.1080/13875868.2018.1531871)
2017
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. B. 2017. Modelling topological features of swarm behaviour in space and time with persistence landscapes. IEEE Access 5 , pp.18534-18544. (10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2749319)
- Jeawak, S. , Jones, C. B. and Schockaert, S. 2017. Using Flickr for characterizing the environment: an exploratory analysis. Presented at: 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) L’Aquila, Italy 4-8 September 2017. 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics. , pp.21:1-21:13. (10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2017.21)
2016
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. B. 2016. Spatio-temporal modeling of the topology of swarm behavior with persistence landscapes. Presented at: ACM - SIGSPATIAL 2016 Burlingame, CA, USA 31 October - 3 November 2016. GIS '16 Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. New York, NY.: ACM(10.1145/2996913.2996949)
2015
- Hall, M. M. , Jones, C. and Smart, P. 2015. Spatial natural language generation for location description in photo captions. Presented at: Conference on Spatial Information Theory COSIT 2015 Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA 12-16 October 2015.
- Slade, J. D. , Jones, C. B. and Rosin, P. L. 2015. Automatic semantic and geometric enrichment of CityGML building models using HoG-based template matching. In: Abdul-Rahman, A. ed. Advances in 3D Geoinformation. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography Springer International Publishing. , pp.357-372. (10.1007/978-3-319-25691-7_20)
- Slade, J. D. , Jones, C. B. and Rosin, P. L. 2015. Semantic and geometric enrichment of 3D geo-spatial building models with photo captions and illustration labels using template matching & SIFT. Presented at: GIS Research UK (GISRUK) 2015 Leeds, UK 15-17 April 2015.
- Spasic, I. et al. 2015. KneeTex: An ontology-driven system for information extraction from MRI reports. Journal of Biomedical Semantics 6 34. (10.1186/s13326-015-0033-1)
2014
- Jones, C. B. , Rosin, P. L. and Slade, J. D. 2014. Semantic and geometric enrichment of 3D geo-spatial models with captioned photos and labelled illustrations. Presented at: Workshop on Vision and Language, 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Coling 2014, Dublin, Ireland 23 August 2014.
- Tanasescu, V. , Smart, P. D. and Jones, C. B. 2014. Reverse geocoding for photo captioning with a meta-gazetteer. Presented at: ACM-SIGSPATIAL 2014 Dallas, Texas, USA 4th November 2014. SIGSPATIAL '14 Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. , pp.509-512. (10.1145/2666310.2666492)
- Van Laere, O. et al., 2014. Georeferencing Wikipedia documents using data from social media sources. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 32 (3) 12. (10.1145/2629685)
2013
- Cooper, C. et al. 2013. Exploring the ripple effect and spatial volatility in house prices in England and Wales: regressing interaction domain cross-correlations against reactive statistics. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 40 (5), pp.763-782. (10.1068/b37062)
2012
- Makki al-Azzawi, A. N. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. B. 2012. What can I do there? Towards the automatic discovery of place-related services and activities. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 26 (2), pp.345-364. (10.1080/13658816.2011.595954)
- Younis, E. E. G. et al., 2012. Hybrid geo-spatial query methods on the semantic web with a spatially-enhanced index of DBpedia. Presented at: GIScience 2012: 7th International Conference on Geographic Information Science Columbus, OH, USA 18-21 September 2012. Published in: Xiao, N. et al., Geographic Information Science: 7th International Conference, GIScience 2012, Columbus, OH, USA, September 18-21, 2012. Proceedings. Vol. 7478.Lecture Notes in Computer Science Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. , pp.340-353. (10.1007/978-3-642-33024-7_25)
2011
- Smart, P. D. , Quinn, J. A. and Jones, C. B. 2011. City model enrichment. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 66 (2), pp.223-234. (10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2010.12.004)
2010
- Hall, M. , Smart, P. D. and Jones, C. B. 2010. Interpreting spatial language in image captions. Cognitive Processing 12 (1), pp.67-94. (10.1007/s10339-010-0385-5)
- Makki al-Azzawi, A. N. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. B. 2010. An ontology of place and service types to facilitate place-affordance geographic information retrieval. Presented at: 6th ACM Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR'10) Zurich, Switzerland 18-19th February 2010. Published in: Purves, R. , Clough, P. and Jones, C. B. eds. GIR '10 Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, Zurich, Switzerland, 18-19 February 2010. New York, NY: ACM(10.1145/1722080.1722085)
- Smart, P. D. , Jones, C. B. and Twaroch, F. A. 2010. Multi-source Toponym Data Integration and Mediation for a Meta-Gazetteer Service. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6292 , pp.234-248. (10.1007/978-3-642-15300-6_17)
- Twaroch, F. A. and Jones, C. B. 2010. A web platform for the evaluation of vernacular place names in automatically constructed gazetteers. Presented at: 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR'10) Zurich, Switzerland 18-19 February 2010. Published in: Purves, R. , Clough, P. and Jones, C. B. eds. GIR '10 Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, Zurich, Switzerland, 18-19 February 2010. New York: Association for Computing Machinery(10.1145/1722080.1722098)
2009
- Abdelmoty, A. et al. 2009. Supporting frameworks for the geospatial semantic web. Presented at: 11th international symposium, SSTD 2009 Aalborg, Denmark 8-10 July 2009. Published in: Mamoulis, N. et al., Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases: 11th International Symposium, SSTD 2009, Aalborg, Denmark, July 8-10, 2009. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. , pp.355-372. (10.1007/978-3-642-02982-0_23)
2008
- Hall, M. and Jones, C. B. 2008. A field based representation for vague areas defined by spatial prepositions. Presented at: Methodologies and Resources for Processing Spatial Language Workshop at LREC’2008 Marrakech, Morocco 31 May 2008. , pp.36-41.
- Hall, M. and Jones, C. B. 2008. Evaluating field crisping methods for representing spatial prepositions. Presented at: ACM Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval Napa Valley, CA, USA 29-30 October 2008. Published in: Jones, C. B. and Purves, R. eds. Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval : 2008, Napa Valley, California, USA, October 29-30, 2008. New York, NY: ACM. , pp.9-10. (10.1145/1460007.1460019)
- Hall, M. and Jones, C. B. 2008. Quantifying spatial prepositions. Presented at: 16th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems Irvine, CA, USA 5-7 November 2008. GIS '08 Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL international conference on Advances in geographic information systems, Irvine, CA, 5-7 November 2008. New York, NY: ACM(10.1145/1463434.1463507)
- Jones, C. B. et al. 2008. Modelling vague places with knowledge from the Web. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 22 (10), pp.1045-1065. (10.1080/13658810701850547)
- Jones, C. B. and Purves, R. S. 2008. Geographical information retrieval. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 22 (3), pp.219-228. (10.1080/13658810701626343)
- Schockaert, S. et al. 2008. Mining topological relations from the Web. Presented at: 28th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications Turin, Italy 1-5 September 2008. Published in: Tjoa, A. M. and Wagner, R. R. eds. DEXA 2008: 19th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications : proceedings, 1-5 September, 2008, Turin, Italy. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society,. , pp.652-656. (10.1109/DEXA.2008.15)
- Twaroch, F. A. , Smart, P. D. and Jones, C. B. 2008. Mining the web to detect place names. Presented at: 2nd international workshop on Geographic information retrieval Napa Valley, CA, USA 29-30 October 2008. Published in: Jones, C. B. and Purves, R. eds. GIR '08 Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Geographic information retrieval. New York: ACM. , pp.43-44. (10.1145/1460007.1460017)
2007
- Abdelmoty, A. , Smart, P. D. and Jones, C. B. 2007. Building place ontologies for the semantic web: Issues and approaches. Presented at: GIR 2007 4th ACM Workshop On Geographic Information Retrieval Lisbon, Portugal 9 November 2007. GIR '07 Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Geographical information retrieval. New York, NY: ACM. , pp.7-12. (10.1145/1316948.1316951)
- Alazzawi, A. N. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. B. 2007. Spatio-temporal Personalised Web Search. Presented at: GISRUK 15th Annual Conference 2007 Maynooth, Ireland 11-13 April 2007. Published in: Winstanley, A. C. ed. GISRUK 2007: Proceedings of the Geographical Information Science Research UK Conference. Maynooth, Ireland: National University of Ireland. , pp.457-459.
- Jones, C. B. et al. 2007. The Design and Implementation of SPIRIT: a Spatially-Aware Search Engine for Information Retrieval on the Internet. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 21 (7), pp.717-745. (10.1080/13658810601169840)
- Smart, P. D. et al., 2007. A framework for combining rules and geo-ontologies. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4524 , pp.133-147. (10.1007/978-3-540-72982-2_10)
2006
- Jones, C. B. et al. 2006. Web-Based Delineation of Imprecise Regions. Computers Environment and Urban Systems 30 (4), pp.436-459. (10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2005.08.001)
- Jones, C. B. and Purves, R. 2006. GIR’05-2005 ACM Workshop on Geographical Information Retrieval. Sigir Forum 40 (1), pp.34-37.
- Leblanc, M. J. et al., 2006. Evidence for Megalake Chad, north-central Africa, during the late Quaternary from satellite data. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 230 (3-4), pp.230-242. (10.1016/j.palaeo.2005.07.016)
- Smart, P. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. 2006. A visual editor for validating Geo-Ontologies in OWL. Presented at: GISRUK 2006: 14th Annual GIS Research UK Conference Nottingam , UK 5-7 April 2006. Published in: Priestnall, G. and Aplin, P. eds. Proceedings of the GIS Research UK 14th Annual Conference. , pp.222-226.
2005
- Fu, G. , Jones, C. B. and Abdelmoty, A. 2005. Building a geographical ontology for intelligent spatial search on the web. Presented at: The IASTED International Conference on Databases and Applications - DBA 2005 Innsbruck, Austria 14-16 February 2005. Published in: Hamza, M. H. ed. Proceedings of IASTED International Conference on Databases and Applications. Anaheim, CA: ACTA Press. , pp.167-172.
- Fu, G. , Jones, C. B. and Abdelmoty, A. 2005. Ontology-based spatial query expansion in information retrieval. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3761 , pp.1466-1482. (10.1007/11575801_33)
- Jones, C. B. and Mark Ware, J. 2005. Map generalization in the Web age. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 19 (8-9), pp.859-870. (10.1080/13658810500161104)
- Vaid, S. et al., 2005. Spatio-Textual Indexing for Geographical Search on the Web. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3633 , pp.218-235. (10.1007/11535331_13)
- Zhou, S. and Jones, C. 2005. Shape-aware line generalisation with weighted effective area. Presented at: 11th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling Leicester, UK 23 - 25 August 2004. Published in: Fisher, P. F. ed. Developments in Spatial Data Handling. Berlin: Springer. , pp.369-380. (10.1007/3-540-26772-7_28)
- Zhou, S. and Jones, C. B. 2005. HCPO: an efficient insertion order for incremental Delaunay triangulation. Information Processing Letters 93 (1), pp.37-42. (10.1016/j.ipl.2004.09.020)
2004
- Jones, C. B. et al. 2004. The SPIRIT spatial search engine: Architecture, ontologies and spatial indexing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3234 , pp.125-139. (10.1007/978-3-540-30231-5_9)
- Morris, A. J. et al., 2004. A filter flow visual querying language and interface for spatial databases. GeoInformatica 8 (2), pp.107-141. (10.1023/B:GEIN.0000017744.85002.4c)
- Smart, P. D. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. B. 2004. An evaluation of geo-ontology representation languages for supporting web retrieval of geographical information. Presented at: GIS Research UK 12th annual conference (GISRUK 2004) Norwich, UK 28th-30th April 2004.
2002
- Jones, C. B. et al. 2002. Spatial information retrieval and geographical ontologies an overview of the SPIRIT project. Presented at: SIGIR 2002: 25th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval Tampere, Finland 11-15 August 2002. Proceedings of the 25th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. New York, NY: ACM. , pp.387-388. (10.1145/564376.564457)
- Ware, J. M. et al., 2002. A tabu search approach to automated map generalisation. Presented at: 10th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems McLean, VA, USA 8-9 November 2002. Proceedings of the 10th ACM international symposium on Advances in geographic information systems. New York, NY: ACM. , pp.101-106. (10.1145/585147.585169)
2001
- Alani, H. , Jones, C. B. and Tudhope, D. 2001. Voronoi-based region approximation for geographical information retrieval with gazetteers. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 15 (4), pp.287-306. (10.1080/13658810110038942)
- Herbert, M. J. and Jones, C. B. 2001. Contour correspondence for serial section reconstruction: complex scenarios in palaeontology. Computers & Geosciences 27 (4), pp.427-440. (10.1016/S0098-3004(00)00076-5)
- Zhou, S. and Jones, C. B. 2001. Design and Implementation of Multi-Scale Databases. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2121 , pp.1611-3349.
2000
- El-Geresy, B. A. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. B. 2000. Episodes in space: qualitative representation and reasoning over spatio-temporal objects. International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools 09 (01) 131. (10.1142/S0218213000000100)
Articles
- Aflaki, N. et al., 2023. An empirical study of the semantic similarity of geospatial prepositions and their senses. Spatial Cognition & Computation 23 (2), pp.132-176. (10.1080/13875868.2022.2111683)
- Alani, H. , Jones, C. B. and Tudhope, D. 2001. Voronoi-based region approximation for geographical information retrieval with gazetteers. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 15 (4), pp.287-306. (10.1080/13658810110038942)
- Cooper, C. et al. 2013. Exploring the ripple effect and spatial volatility in house prices in England and Wales: regressing interaction domain cross-correlations against reactive statistics. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 40 (5), pp.763-782. (10.1068/b37062)
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. 2022. A persistent homology model of street network connectivity. Transactions in GIS 21 (1), pp.155-181. (10.1111/tgis.12844)
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. 2023. Topological data analysis for geographical information science using persistent homology. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 37 (3), pp.712-745. (10.1080/13658816.2022.2155654)
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. B. 2017. Modelling topological features of swarm behaviour in space and time with persistence landscapes. IEEE Access 5 , pp.18534-18544. (10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2749319)
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. B. 2018. Stability and statistical inferences in the space of topological spatial relationships. IEEE Access 6 , pp.18907-18919. (10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2817493)
- Edwards, T. , Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. B. 2025. A hybrid approach for geo-referencing tweets: transformer language model regression and gazetteer disambiguation. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 14 (9) 321. (10.3390/ijgi14090321)
- Edwards, T. , Jones, C. B. and Corcoran, P. 2022. Identifying wildlife observations on twitter. Ecological Informatics 67 101500. (10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101500)
- Edwards, T. et al. 2021. Passive citizen science: The role of social media in wildlife observations. PLoS ONE 16 (8) e0255416. (10.1371/journal.pone.0255416)
- El-Geresy, B. A. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. B. 2000. Episodes in space: qualitative representation and reasoning over spatio-temporal objects. International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools 09 (01) 131. (10.1142/S0218213000000100)
- Fu, G. , Jones, C. B. and Abdelmoty, A. 2005. Ontology-based spatial query expansion in information retrieval. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3761 , pp.1466-1482. (10.1007/11575801_33)
- Hall, M. , Smart, P. D. and Jones, C. B. 2010. Interpreting spatial language in image captions. Cognitive Processing 12 (1), pp.67-94. (10.1007/s10339-010-0385-5)
- Hall, M. M. and Jones, C. B. 2022. Generating geographical location descriptions with spatial templates: a salient toponym driven approach. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 36 (1), pp.55-85. (10.1080/13658816.2021.1913498)
- Herbert, M. J. and Jones, C. B. 2001. Contour correspondence for serial section reconstruction: complex scenarios in palaeontology. Computers & Geosciences 27 (4), pp.427-440. (10.1016/S0098-3004(00)00076-5)
- Jeawak, S. , Jones, C. and Schockaert, S. 2020. Predicting environmental features by learning spatiotemporal embeddings from social media. Ecological Informatics 55 101031. (10.1016/j.ecoinf.2019.101031)
- Jeawak, S. S. , Jones, C. B. and Schockaert, S. 2020. Predicting the environment from social media: a collective classification approach. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 82 (10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2020.101487)
- Jones, C. B. , Stock, K. and Perkins, S. E. 2024. AI-based discovery of habitats from museum collections. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 39 (4), pp.323-327. (10.1016/j.tree.2024.01.006)
- Jones, C. B. et al. 2004. The SPIRIT spatial search engine: Architecture, ontologies and spatial indexing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3234 , pp.125-139. (10.1007/978-3-540-30231-5_9)
- Jones, C. B. et al. 2007. The Design and Implementation of SPIRIT: a Spatially-Aware Search Engine for Information Retrieval on the Internet. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 21 (7), pp.717-745. (10.1080/13658810601169840)
- Jones, C. B. et al. 2006. Web-Based Delineation of Imprecise Regions. Computers Environment and Urban Systems 30 (4), pp.436-459. (10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2005.08.001)
- Jones, C. B. and Mark Ware, J. 2005. Map generalization in the Web age. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 19 (8-9), pp.859-870. (10.1080/13658810500161104)
- Jones, C. B. et al. 2008. Modelling vague places with knowledge from the Web. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 22 (10), pp.1045-1065. (10.1080/13658810701850547)
- Jones, C. B. and Purves, R. 2006. GIR’05-2005 ACM Workshop on Geographical Information Retrieval. Sigir Forum 40 (1), pp.34-37.
- Jones, C. B. and Purves, R. S. 2008. Geographical information retrieval. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 22 (3), pp.219-228. (10.1080/13658810701626343)
- Leblanc, M. J. et al., 2006. Evidence for Megalake Chad, north-central Africa, during the late Quaternary from satellite data. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 230 (3-4), pp.230-242. (10.1016/j.palaeo.2005.07.016)
- Makki al-Azzawi, A. N. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. B. 2012. What can I do there? Towards the automatic discovery of place-related services and activities. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 26 (2), pp.345-364. (10.1080/13658816.2011.595954)
- Morris, A. J. et al., 2004. A filter flow visual querying language and interface for spatial databases. GeoInformatica 8 (2), pp.107-141. (10.1023/B:GEIN.0000017744.85002.4c)
- Prizeman, O. et al. 2018. How can century-old architectural hierarchies for the design of public libraries be re-interpreted and re-used?. Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development 8 (4), pp.481-494. (10.1108/JCHMSD-08-2017-0051)
- Purves, R. S. et al., 2018. Geographic information retrieval: progress and challenges in spatial search of text. Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 12 (2-3), pp.164-318. (10.1561/1500000034)
- Radke, M. A. et al., 2022. Disambiguating spatial prepositions: The case of geo-spatial sense detection. Transactions in GIS 26 (6), pp.2621-2650. (10.1111/tgis.12976)
- Smart, P. D. et al., 2007. A framework for combining rules and geo-ontologies. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4524 , pp.133-147. (10.1007/978-3-540-72982-2_10)
- Smart, P. D. , Jones, C. B. and Twaroch, F. A. 2010. Multi-source Toponym Data Integration and Mediation for a Meta-Gazetteer Service. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6292 , pp.234-248. (10.1007/978-3-642-15300-6_17)
- Smart, P. D. , Quinn, J. A. and Jones, C. B. 2011. City model enrichment. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 66 (2), pp.223-234. (10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2010.12.004)
- Spasic, I. et al. 2015. KneeTex: An ontology-driven system for information extraction from MRI reports. Journal of Biomedical Semantics 6 34. (10.1186/s13326-015-0033-1)
- Stock, K. et al., 2022. Detecting geospatial location descriptions in natural language text. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 36 (3), pp.547-584. (10.1080/13658816.2021.1987441)
- Stock, K. , Jones, C. B. and Tenbrink, T. 2022. Speaking of location: a review of spatial language research. Spatial Cognition & Computation 22 (3-4), pp.185-224. (10.1080/13875868.2022.2095275)
- Stock, K. et al., 2023. The BioWhere Project: unlocking the potential of biological collections data. GI_Forum 11 (1), pp.3-21. (10.1553/giscience2023_01_s3)
- Twaroch, F. A. et al., 2018. Investigating behavioural and computational approaches for defining imprecise regions. Spatial Cognition & Computation (10.1080/13875868.2018.1531871)
- Vaid, S. et al., 2005. Spatio-Textual Indexing for Geographical Search on the Web. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3633 , pp.218-235. (10.1007/11535331_13)
- Van Laere, O. et al., 2014. Georeferencing Wikipedia documents using data from social media sources. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 32 (3) 12. (10.1145/2629685)
- Wijegunarathna, K. I. , Stock, K. and Jones, C. B. 2026. Digital gazetteers: Review and prospects for place name knowledge bases. ACM Computing Surveys 58 (3) 69. (10.1145/3763231)
- Zhou, S. and Jones, C. B. 2001. Design and Implementation of Multi-Scale Databases. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2121 , pp.1611-3349.
- Zhou, S. and Jones, C. B. 2005. HCPO: an efficient insertion order for incremental Delaunay triangulation. Information Processing Letters 93 (1), pp.37-42. (10.1016/j.ipl.2004.09.020)
Book sections
- Slade, J. D. , Jones, C. B. and Rosin, P. L. 2015. Automatic semantic and geometric enrichment of CityGML building models using HoG-based template matching. In: Abdul-Rahman, A. ed. Advances in 3D Geoinformation. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography Springer International Publishing. , pp.357-372. (10.1007/978-3-319-25691-7_20)
Conferences
- Abdelmoty, A. et al. 2009. Supporting frameworks for the geospatial semantic web. Presented at: 11th international symposium, SSTD 2009 Aalborg, Denmark 8-10 July 2009. Published in: Mamoulis, N. et al., Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases: 11th International Symposium, SSTD 2009, Aalborg, Denmark, July 8-10, 2009. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. , pp.355-372. (10.1007/978-3-642-02982-0_23)
- Abdelmoty, A. , Smart, P. D. and Jones, C. B. 2007. Building place ontologies for the semantic web: Issues and approaches. Presented at: GIR 2007 4th ACM Workshop On Geographic Information Retrieval Lisbon, Portugal 9 November 2007. GIR '07 Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Geographical information retrieval. New York, NY: ACM. , pp.7-12. (10.1145/1316948.1316951)
- Alazzawi, A. N. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. B. 2007. Spatio-temporal Personalised Web Search. Presented at: GISRUK 15th Annual Conference 2007 Maynooth, Ireland 11-13 April 2007. Published in: Winstanley, A. C. ed. GISRUK 2007: Proceedings of the Geographical Information Science Research UK Conference. Maynooth, Ireland: National University of Ireland. , pp.457-459.
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. 2018. Robust tracking of objects with dynamic topology. Presented at: ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems Seattle, Washington, USA 6-9 November 2018. ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. ACM. , pp.428-431. (10.1145/3274895.3274922)
- Corcoran, P. and Jones, C. B. 2016. Spatio-temporal modeling of the topology of swarm behavior with persistence landscapes. Presented at: ACM - SIGSPATIAL 2016 Burlingame, CA, USA 31 October - 3 November 2016. GIS '16 Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. New York, NY.: ACM(10.1145/2996913.2996949)
- Fu, G. , Jones, C. B. and Abdelmoty, A. 2005. Building a geographical ontology for intelligent spatial search on the web. Presented at: The IASTED International Conference on Databases and Applications - DBA 2005 Innsbruck, Austria 14-16 February 2005. Published in: Hamza, M. H. ed. Proceedings of IASTED International Conference on Databases and Applications. Anaheim, CA: ACTA Press. , pp.167-172.
- Hall, M. and Jones, C. B. 2008. A field based representation for vague areas defined by spatial prepositions. Presented at: Methodologies and Resources for Processing Spatial Language Workshop at LREC’2008 Marrakech, Morocco 31 May 2008. , pp.36-41.
- Hall, M. and Jones, C. B. 2008. Evaluating field crisping methods for representing spatial prepositions. Presented at: ACM Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval Napa Valley, CA, USA 29-30 October 2008. Published in: Jones, C. B. and Purves, R. eds. Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval : 2008, Napa Valley, California, USA, October 29-30, 2008. New York, NY: ACM. , pp.9-10. (10.1145/1460007.1460019)
- Hall, M. and Jones, C. B. 2008. Quantifying spatial prepositions. Presented at: 16th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems Irvine, CA, USA 5-7 November 2008. GIS '08 Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL international conference on Advances in geographic information systems, Irvine, CA, 5-7 November 2008. New York, NY: ACM(10.1145/1463434.1463507)
- Hall, M. M. , Jones, C. and Smart, P. 2015. Spatial natural language generation for location description in photo captions. Presented at: Conference on Spatial Information Theory COSIT 2015 Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA 12-16 October 2015.
- Jeawak, S. , Jones, C. and Schockaert, S. 2019. Embedding geographic locations for modelling the natural environment using Flickr tags and structured data. Presented at: ECIR 2019: 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval Cologne, Germany 14-18 April 2019. , pp.-.
- Jeawak, S. , Jones, C. and Schockaert, S. 2018. Mapping wildlife species distribution with social media: Augmenting text classification with species names. Presented at: GIScience 2018: 10th International Conference on Geographic Information Science Melbourne, Australia 28-31 August 2018. Published in: Winter, S. , Griffin, A. and Sester, M. eds. 10th International Conference of Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2018). Vol. 114.Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) Dagstuhl, Germany: Schloss Dagstuhl/Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. , pp.34:1-34:6. (10.4230/LIPIcs.GISCIENCE.2018.34)
- Jeawak, S. , Jones, C. B. and Schockaert, S. 2017. Using Flickr for characterizing the environment: an exploratory analysis. Presented at: 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) L’Aquila, Italy 4-8 September 2017. 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics. , pp.21:1-21:13. (10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2017.21)
- Jones, C. B. et al. 2002. Spatial information retrieval and geographical ontologies an overview of the SPIRIT project. Presented at: SIGIR 2002: 25th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval Tampere, Finland 11-15 August 2002. Proceedings of the 25th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. New York, NY: ACM. , pp.387-388. (10.1145/564376.564457)
- Jones, C. B. , Rosin, P. L. and Slade, J. D. 2014. Semantic and geometric enrichment of 3D geo-spatial models with captioned photos and labelled illustrations. Presented at: Workshop on Vision and Language, 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Coling 2014, Dublin, Ireland 23 August 2014.
- Liao, R. et al., 2022. Predicting distance and direction from text locality descriptions for biological specimen collections. Presented at: 15th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2022) Kobe, Japan 5-9 September, 2022. Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics. Vol. 240.International Conference on Spatial Information Theory Vol. 4. Liebniz, Germany: Dagstuhl Publishing. , pp.1-15. (10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2022.4)
- Makki al-Azzawi, A. N. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. B. 2010. An ontology of place and service types to facilitate place-affordance geographic information retrieval. Presented at: 6th ACM Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR'10) Zurich, Switzerland 18-19th February 2010. Published in: Purves, R. , Clough, P. and Jones, C. B. eds. GIR '10 Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, Zurich, Switzerland, 18-19 February 2010. New York, NY: ACM(10.1145/1722080.1722085)
- Pezzica, C. et al. 2019. Between images and built form: automating the recognition of standardised building components using deep learning. Presented at: 27th CIPA International Symposium “Documenting the past for a better future” Avila, Spain 1-5 September 2019. ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Vol. IV-2.Copernicus. , pp.123-132. (10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-2-W6-123-2019)
- Schockaert, S. et al. 2008. Mining topological relations from the Web. Presented at: 28th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications Turin, Italy 1-5 September 2008. Published in: Tjoa, A. M. and Wagner, R. R. eds. DEXA 2008: 19th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications : proceedings, 1-5 September, 2008, Turin, Italy. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society,. , pp.652-656. (10.1109/DEXA.2008.15)
- Sinha, S. et al., 2023. Sarcasm detection in product reviews using textual entailment approach. Presented at: 7th International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Information Seoul, South Korea 15-17 December 2023. NLPIR '23: Proceedings of the 2023 7th International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. Association for Computing Machinery. , pp.310-318. (10.1145/3639233.3639252)
- Slade, J. D. , Jones, C. B. and Rosin, P. L. 2015. Semantic and geometric enrichment of 3D geo-spatial building models with photo captions and illustration labels using template matching & SIFT. Presented at: GIS Research UK (GISRUK) 2015 Leeds, UK 15-17 April 2015.
- Smart, P. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. 2006. A visual editor for validating Geo-Ontologies in OWL. Presented at: GISRUK 2006: 14th Annual GIS Research UK Conference Nottingam , UK 5-7 April 2006. Published in: Priestnall, G. and Aplin, P. eds. Proceedings of the GIS Research UK 14th Annual Conference. , pp.222-226.
- Smart, P. D. , Abdelmoty, A. and Jones, C. B. 2004. An evaluation of geo-ontology representation languages for supporting web retrieval of geographical information. Presented at: GIS Research UK 12th annual conference (GISRUK 2004) Norwich, UK 28th-30th April 2004.
- Tanasescu, V. , Smart, P. D. and Jones, C. B. 2014. Reverse geocoding for photo captioning with a meta-gazetteer. Presented at: ACM-SIGSPATIAL 2014 Dallas, Texas, USA 4th November 2014. SIGSPATIAL '14 Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. , pp.509-512. (10.1145/2666310.2666492)
- Twaroch, F. A. and Jones, C. B. 2010. A web platform for the evaluation of vernacular place names in automatically constructed gazetteers. Presented at: 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR'10) Zurich, Switzerland 18-19 February 2010. Published in: Purves, R. , Clough, P. and Jones, C. B. eds. GIR '10 Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, Zurich, Switzerland, 18-19 February 2010. New York: Association for Computing Machinery(10.1145/1722080.1722098)
- Twaroch, F. A. , Smart, P. D. and Jones, C. B. 2008. Mining the web to detect place names. Presented at: 2nd international workshop on Geographic information retrieval Napa Valley, CA, USA 29-30 October 2008. Published in: Jones, C. B. and Purves, R. eds. GIR '08 Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Geographic information retrieval. New York: ACM. , pp.43-44. (10.1145/1460007.1460017)
- Ware, J. M. et al., 2002. A tabu search approach to automated map generalisation. Presented at: 10th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems McLean, VA, USA 8-9 November 2002. Proceedings of the 10th ACM international symposium on Advances in geographic information systems. New York, NY: ACM. , pp.101-106. (10.1145/585147.585169)
- Wijegunarathna, K. , Stock, K. and Jones, C. B. 2025. Large multi-modal model cartographic map comprehension for textual locality georeferencing. Presented at: 13th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025) Christchurch, New Zealand 26-29 August 2025. Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs). Vol. 346.Leibniz: Schloss Dagstuhl. , pp.1-19. (10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.12)
- Younis, E. E. G. et al., 2012. Hybrid geo-spatial query methods on the semantic web with a spatially-enhanced index of DBpedia. Presented at: GIScience 2012: 7th International Conference on Geographic Information Science Columbus, OH, USA 18-21 September 2012. Published in: Xiao, N. et al., Geographic Information Science: 7th International Conference, GIScience 2012, Columbus, OH, USA, September 18-21, 2012. Proceedings. Vol. 7478.Lecture Notes in Computer Science Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. , pp.340-353. (10.1007/978-3-642-33024-7_25)
- Zhou, S. and Jones, C. 2005. Shape-aware line generalisation with weighted effective area. Presented at: 11th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling Leicester, UK 23 - 25 August 2004. Published in: Fisher, P. F. ed. Developments in Spatial Data Handling. Berlin: Springer. , pp.369-380. (10.1007/3-540-26772-7_28)
Research
My main research interests are in geographical information systems (GIS), computer cartography and the retrieval of geographically-specific information on the web. For several years I have worked on the representation of map features at multiple levels of detail, resulting in the development of multi-scale spatial databases and of techniques for automated map generalisation. Research on geographically-aware web search engines has been concerned with spatial indexing of web documents and images and with designing ontologies that represent knowledge about the terminology and form of geographical places. I have also worked on environmental change detection, map labelling, data integration and 3D modelling of terrain and of fossils.
Biography
Education
1977 : PhD University of Newcastle upon Tyne (Department of Geophysics and Planetary Physics); Topic: Analysis of chemical, physical and optical periodicities in growth rings of Precambrian stromatolites.
1972 : BSc Geology, University of Bristol
Previous posts
1994-2000 : Professor of Geographical Information Systems, University of South Wales.
1993-1994 : Lecturer in Geographical Information Systems, Course Director of MPhil in GIS and Remote Sensing, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. Fellow and Director of Studies for Geography, Fitzwilliam College.
1983-1992 : Reader (from 1990), previously Principal Lecturer (from 1985) in computer graphics, University of South Waales
1981-1983 : Earth Scientist (Computing), BP Exploration, London
1976-1981 : Analyst/Programmer, British Geological Survey, Edinburgh and Nottingham