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

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society volume 17, pages 267–279 (2011)Cite this article

Abstract

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.

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Author information

Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ciência da Computação, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Av. Antônio Carlos 6627, ICEx, sl. 4010, CEP: 31270-010, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brasil

    Ivre Marjorie R. Machado, Rafael Odon de Alencar & Clodoveu A. Davis Jr.

  2. Serviço Federal de Processamento de Dados (SERPRO), Av. José Cândido da Silveira 1200, CEP: 31035-536, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brasil

    Rafael Odon de Alencar & Roberto de Oliveira Campos Jr.

  3. Programa de Pós-graduação em Engenharia Elétrica, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais (PUC Minas), Av. Dom José Gaspar, 500, Prédio 03, sl. 218, CEP: 30535-610, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brasil

    Roberto de Oliveira Campos Jr.

Authors
  1. Ivre Marjorie R. Machado
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  2. Rafael Odon de Alencar
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  3. Roberto de Oliveira Campos Jr.
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  4. Clodoveu A. Davis Jr.
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ivre Marjorie R. Machado.

Additional information

A previous version of this paper appeared at GEOINFO 2010, the Brazilian Symposium on Geoinformatics.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Machado, I.M.R., de Alencar, R.O., Campos, R.d.O. et al. An ontological gazetteer and its application for place name disambiguation in text. J Braz Comput Soc 17, 267–279 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13173-011-0044-4

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Keywords

  • Geographic information retrieval
  • Gazetteer
  • Spatial ontologies
  • Place name disambiguation