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 language | English |
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Journal | International Journal of Geographical Information Science |
Volume | 22 |
Issue number | 10 |
Pages (from-to) | 1129-1157 |
Number of pages | 29 |
ISSN | 1365-8816 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2008 |
Keywords
- Gazetteer research
- Ontology
- Semantic similarity