TY - GEN
T1 - Bottom-up gazetteers
T2 - 3rd International Conference on Geospatial Semantics, GeoS 2009
AU - Keßler, Carsten
AU - Maué, Patrick
AU - Heuer, Jan Torben
AU - Bartoschek, Thomas
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - As directories of named places, gazetteers link the names to geographic footprints and place types. Most existing gazetteers are managed strictly top-down: entries can only be added or changed by the responsible toponymic authority. The covered vocabulary is therefore often limited to an administrative view on places, using only official place names. In this paper, we propose a bottom-up approach for gazetteer building based on geotagged photos harvested from the web. We discuss the building blocks of a geotag and how they relate to each other to formally define the notion of a geotag. Based on this formalization, we introduce an extraction process for gazetteer entries that captures the emergent semantics of collections of geotagged photos and provides a group-cognitive perspective on named places. Using an experimental setup based on clustering and filtering algorithms, we demonstrate how to identify place names and assign adequate geographic footprints. The results for three different place names (Soho, Camino de Santiago and Kilimanjaro), representing different geographic feature types, are evaluated and compared to the results obtained from traditional gazetteers. Finally, we sketch how our approach can be combined with other (for example, linguistic) approaches and discuss how such a bottom-up gazetteer can complement existing gazetteers.
AB - As directories of named places, gazetteers link the names to geographic footprints and place types. Most existing gazetteers are managed strictly top-down: entries can only be added or changed by the responsible toponymic authority. The covered vocabulary is therefore often limited to an administrative view on places, using only official place names. In this paper, we propose a bottom-up approach for gazetteer building based on geotagged photos harvested from the web. We discuss the building blocks of a geotag and how they relate to each other to formally define the notion of a geotag. Based on this formalization, we introduce an extraction process for gazetteer entries that captures the emergent semantics of collections of geotagged photos and provides a group-cognitive perspective on named places. Using an experimental setup based on clustering and filtering algorithms, we demonstrate how to identify place names and assign adequate geographic footprints. The results for three different place names (Soho, Camino de Santiago and Kilimanjaro), representing different geographic feature types, are evaluated and compared to the results obtained from traditional gazetteers. Finally, we sketch how our approach can be combined with other (for example, linguistic) approaches and discuss how such a bottom-up gazetteer can complement existing gazetteers.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=78650672146&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-10436-7_6
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-10436-7_6
M3 - Article in proceeding
AN - SCOPUS:78650672146
SN - 3642104355
SN - 9783642104350
VL - 5892 LNCS
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 83
EP - 102
BT - GeoSpatial Semantics - Third International Conference, GeoS 2009, Proceedings
Y2 - 3 December 2009 through 4 December 2009
ER -