The role of ontology in improving gazetteer interaction

K. Janowicz*, C. Keßler

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

57 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
JournalInternational Journal of Geographical Information Science
Volume22
Issue number10
Pages (from-to)1129-1157
Number of pages29
ISSN1365-8816
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2008

Keywords

  • Gazetteer research
  • Ontology
  • Semantic similarity

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The role of ontology in improving gazetteer interaction'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this