An ontological gazetteer and its application for place name disambiguation in text

The volume of spatial information on the Web grows daily, both in the form of online maps and as references to places embedded in documents and pages. Considering the spatial information needs of users, it is often necessary to recognize, within a document’s text, the places to which it refers. This article presents a next-generation gazetteer, a toponymic dictionary which expands from the traditional cataloguing of place names and includes geographic elements such as spatial relationships, concepts and terms related to places. As such, we call it an OntoGazetteer, i.e., a gazetteer which also records semantic connections among places. The ontological gazetteer provides factual and semantic support to solving several common problems in geographic information retrieval. This paper presents the OntoGazetteer and demonstrates its applicability to a place name disambiguation problem. Along with other problem solutions to which the OntoGazetteer can contribute, we present a case study on recognizing and disambiguating place names within news sources.