Several projects are involved in construction of gazetteers, and geographic thesauri and ontologies for use in geographic information retrieval. SPIRIT (spatially-aware information retrieval on the internet) [17] is a project funded under the EC Fifth Framework Programme aimed at improving search capabilities on the Internet by using geographical and conceptual ontologies to model both the vocabulary and the spatial structure of places for purposes of information retrieval. This ontology, which is envisioned as an extension to traditional gazetteers is expected to help finding footprints of place names and related locations as well as help ranging hits based on geographic properties. The geoXwalk project [21] is a project aimed at providing a british and Irish gazetteer service. geoXwalk is now in its third phase focusing on three main features of geographic information retrieval; a gazetteer server / database supporting spatial searches, a set of middleware components comprising APIs supporting open protocols to issue spatial and/or aspatial search queries, a semi- automatic document ‘scanner’ that can parse non- geographically indexed documents for placenames, relate them to the gazetteer and return appropriate geo-references (coordinates) for confirmed matches – a ‘geoparser’