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Bottom-Up Gazetteers: Learning from the Implicit Semantics of Geotags

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GeoSpatial Semantics (GeoS 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5892))

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Abstract

As directories of named places, gazetteers link the names to geographic footprints and place types. Most existing gazetteers are managed strictly top-down: entries can only be added or changed by the responsible toponymic authority. The covered vocabulary is therefore often limited to an administrative view on places, using only official place names. In this paper, we propose a bottom-up approach for gazetteer building based on geotagged photos harvested from the web. We discuss the building blocks of a geotag and how they relate to each other to formally define the notion of a geotag. Based on this formalization, we introduce an extraction process for gazetteer entries that captures the emergent semantics of collections of geotagged photos and provides a group-cognitive perspective on named places. Using an experimental setup based on clustering and filtering algorithms, we demonstrate how to identify place names and assign adequate geographic footprints. The results for three different place names (Soho, Camino de Santiago and Kilimanjaro), representing different geographic feature types, are evaluated and compared to the results obtained from traditional gazetteers. Finally, we sketch how our approach can be combined with other (for example, linguistic) approaches and discuss how such a bottom-up gazetteer can complement existing gazetteers.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Germany

    Carsten Keßler, Patrick Maué, Jan Torben Heuer & Thomas Bartoschek

Authors
  1. Carsten Keßler
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  2. Patrick Maué
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  3. Jan Torben Heuer
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  4. Thomas Bartoschek
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, 16802, PA, USA

    Krzysztof Janowicz

  2. Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, 93106, CA, USA

    Martin Raubal

  3. Centro de Investigacion en Computacion, National Polytechnic Institute, 07738, Mexico City, Mexico

    Sergei Levashkin

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Keßler, C., Maué, P., Heuer, J.T., Bartoschek, T. (2009). Bottom-Up Gazetteers: Learning from the Implicit Semantics of Geotags. In: Janowicz, K., Raubal, M., Levashkin, S. (eds) GeoSpatial Semantics. GeoS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5892. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10436-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10436-7_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10435-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10436-7

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