An ontological gazetteer and its application for place name disambiguation in text

Abstract

The volume of spatial information on the Web grows daily, both in the form of online maps and as references to places embedded in documents and pages. Considering the spatial information needs of users, it is often necessary to recognize, within a document's text, the places to which it refers. This article presents a next-generation gazetteer, a toponymic dictionary which expands from the traditional cataloguing of place names and includes geographic elements such as spatial relationships, concepts and terms related to places. As such, we call it an OntoGazetteer, i.e., a gazetteer which also records semantic connections among places. The ontological gazetteer provides factual A previous version of this paper appeared at GEOINFO 2010, the Brazilian Symposium on Geoinformatics. and semantic support to solving several common problems in geographic information retrieval. This paper presents the OntoGazetteer and demonstrates its applicability to a place name disambiguation problem. Along with other problem solutions to which the OntoGazetteer can contribute, we present a case study on recognizing and disambiguating place names within news sources.

Automatic gazetteer enrichment with user-geocoded data

“…Examples of merge problems are that the same place may have entirely different names, or different accepted spellings, or spatial relations between places might be unclear [21].…”

Semantic Location Extraction From Crowdsourced Data

“…Many countries have developed and maintain their own gazetteers. Digital online formats like Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer 6 (ADL), Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names 7 (TGN) and GeoNames 8 are available (Machado et al, 2011). Furthermore, integrated semantic geospatial information retrieval systems are also slowly become available.…”

“…A good example is GeoWordNet 9 (georeferenced version of WordNet 10 ) which is an integrated system of GeoNames with WordNet plus the Italian section of MultiWordNet 11 (Giunchiglia et al, 2010, Buscaldi andRosso, 2009). Gazetteers are widely used in Geospatial Information Retrieval (GIR) research (Borges et al, 2011, Amitay et al, 2004, Hill, 2000, Souza et al, 2005 but it is mostly argued that they are not fully supported in this sense as there are structural limitations and lack of intra-urban place names, no records on spatial relationships among elements other than relying on their proximity based footprints (Machado et al, 2011). Automatic recognition of geographic characteristics from web contents remain challenging and numerous approaches like automatic indexing and georeferencing (Larson, 1996), ontology-driven approaches (Jones et al, 2001, Fu et al, 2005a, semantic query expansion (Delboni et al, 2007, Fu et al, 2005b and natural language positioning (Delboni et al, 2007) along with gazetteers and geocoding techniques are proposed (Borges et al, 2011).…”

Automatic Extraction of Spatio-Temporal Information from Arabic Text Documents

“…Many studies on extracting geographic information from text documents have been proposed, and applied throughout previous years. [3,4,5,6].…”