DEFINING VAGUE PLACES WITH WEB KNOWLEDGE , A SEMANTIC APPROACH

Abstract

Online gazetteers provide services that help to geocode locations. Given the name, the gazetteer will attempt to provide coordinates for the place, usually in point information. Point information is not always the best solution: urban areas, administrative units, or rivers are better described using polygons or lines. There is a clear need for region geocoding. In official administrative units, the situation is not critical. This kind of data is most of the time available from online spatial data repositories. On the other hand, non-official boundaries are difficult to find and, old boundaries or folklore delimitations difficult to obtain. For example, Mittelland in Switzerland or the Scottish highlands. Solutions regarding the web are already proposed by Arampatzis et al. [AvKR+ 06] and Christopher B. Jones et al. [JPCJ08] inside the research by the SPIRIT project [PRS+ 02]. Those approaches use google search and classification to obtain the information; this project will aim to obtain similar results using semantic web approaches.