Digital gazetteers: review and prospects for place name knowledge bases

TL;DR

This paper reviews digital gazetteers, discussing their data sources, technologies, and challenges, and highlights future needs for richer place representations and improved data integration methods.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of digital gazetteer technologies, data sources, and challenges, and proposes directions for future research in place representation and data integration.

Findings

Many gazetteers lack standard encoding formats.

Current gazetteers are limited in representing multiple facets of places.

Future work should focus on richer place representations and better data integration methods.

Abstract

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.