Publications

Extracting geographic features from the internet to automatically build detailed regional gazetteers

Abstract

The utility of every imaginable application which incorporates a gazetteer hinges on the simple fact that the resulting system will only be as useful, complete, or accurate as the underlying gazetteer itself. A major issue confronting gazetteers utilized in systems today is that they are not complete and measures of their accuracy are largely unknown. In this paper we describe a methodology which addresses this problem by automatically generating highly complete and detailed regional gazetteers from Internet sources. We utilize information extraction and integration techniques to automatically obtain geographic features and associated footprints and feature types from freely and widely available online data which could be applied to create a gazetteer for nearly any area. We discuss the distinguishing characteristics of the generated gazetteer and extend previous work to define measures which can be used to assess …

Date
January 1, 2009
Authors
Daniel W Goldberg, John P Wilson, Craig A Knoblock
Journal
International Journal of Geographical Information Science
Volume
23
Issue
1
Pages
93-128
Publisher
Taylor & Francis