The role of ontology in improving gazetteer interaction

Gazetteers are more than basic place name directories containing names and locations for named geographic places. Most of them contain additional information, including a categorization of gazetteer entries using a typing scheme. This paper focuses on the nature of these categorization schemes. We argue that gazetteers can benefit from an ontological approach to typing schemes, providing a formalization that will better support gazetteer applications, maintenance, interoperability, and semi-automatic feature annotation. We discuss the process of developing such an ontology as a modification of an existing feature type thesaurus; the difficulties in mapping from thesauri to ontologies are described in detail. To demonstrate the benefits of a categorization based on ontologies, a new gazetteer Web (and programming) interface is introduced and the impact on gazetteer interoperability is discussed.