Digital gazetteers: review and prospects for place name knowledge bases

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wijegunarathna, Kalana, Stock, Kristin, Jones, Christopher B.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wijegunarathna, Kalana
Stock, Kristin
Jones, Christopher B.
author_facet Wijegunarathna, Kalana
Stock, Kristin
Jones, Christopher B.
contents Gazetteers typically store data on place names, place types and the associated coordinates. They play an essential role in disambiguating place names in online geographical information retrieval systems for navigation and mapping, detecting and disambiguating place names in text, and providing coordinates. Currently there are many gazetteers in use derived from many sources, with no commonly accepted standard for encoding the data. Most gazetteers are also very limited in the extent to which they represent the multiple facets of the named places yet they have potential to assist user search for locations with specific physical, commercial, social or cultural characteristics. With a view to understanding digital gazetteer technologies and advancing their future effectiveness for information retrieval, we provide a review of data sources, components, software and data management technologies, data quality and volunteered data, and methods for matching sources that refer to the same real-world places. We highlight the need for future work on richer representation of named places, the temporal evolution of place identity and location, and the development of more effective methods for data integration.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_08553
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Digital gazetteers: review and prospects for place name knowledge bases
Wijegunarathna, Kalana
Stock, Kristin
Jones, Christopher B.
Information Retrieval
Gazetteers typically store data on place names, place types and the associated coordinates. They play an essential role in disambiguating place names in online geographical information retrieval systems for navigation and mapping, detecting and disambiguating place names in text, and providing coordinates. Currently there are many gazetteers in use derived from many sources, with no commonly accepted standard for encoding the data. Most gazetteers are also very limited in the extent to which they represent the multiple facets of the named places yet they have potential to assist user search for locations with specific physical, commercial, social or cultural characteristics. With a view to understanding digital gazetteer technologies and advancing their future effectiveness for information retrieval, we provide a review of data sources, components, software and data management technologies, data quality and volunteered data, and methods for matching sources that refer to the same real-world places. We highlight the need for future work on richer representation of named places, the temporal evolution of place identity and location, and the development of more effective methods for data integration.
title Digital gazetteers: review and prospects for place name knowledge bases
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08553