An agenda for the next generation gazetteer: Geographic information contribution and retrieval

Gazetteers are key components of georeferenced information systems, including applications such as Web-based mapping services. Existing gazetteers lack the capabilities to fully integrate user-contributed and vernacular geographic information, as well as to support complex queries. To address these issues, a next generation gazetteer should leverage formal semantics, harvesting of implicit geographic information - such as geotagged photos - as well as models of trust for contributors. In this paper, we discuss these requirements in detail. We elucidate how existing standards can be integrated to realize a gazetteer infrastructure allowing for bottom-up contribution as well as information exchange between different gazetteers. We show how to ensure the quality of user-contributed information and demonstrate how to improve querying and navigation using semantics-based information retrieval.