A New Method for the Specification of Geographic Footprints in Digital Gazetteers

Wilson, John P.; Lam, Christine S.; Holmes-Wong, Deborah A.

doi:10.1559/1523040042742394

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…This is a further development of the approach by Wilson et al. (2004) to estimate neighborhood extent with simple circles.…”

Section: The Algorithmmentioning

confidence: 87%

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Mapping regions with partially defined boundaries

Plewe

2021

Transactions in GIS

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Many types of regions, even administrative regions, have boundaries that are partially or inconsistently defined, especially in historical GIS applications. Such a region may have a mix of clearly defined boundaries, vague references, uncertain locations, and gaps with no definition at all. These types of boundary definitions can be represented in a Qualified Assertion database that faithfully represents source materials. Using a hypothesis of how humans reason in these situations, an algorithm has been developed to estimate the extent of a queried region from these piecemeal boundaries, visually representing vagueness and uncertainty. This estimation is performed at query time, rather than being stored in the database. This region estimation algorithm is implemented in a web service that maps the extent of historical religious congregations that exhibit a wide variety of uncertainty and vagueness in their jurisdictional boundaries.

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“…This is a further development of the approach by Wilson et al. (2004) to estimate neighborhood extent with simple circles.…”

Section: The Algorithmmentioning

confidence: 87%

“… General size . Regions often have a maximum meaningful size, so the most basic approximation of a region extent might just be a circle with a reasonable radius (Wieczorek, Guo, & Hijmans, 2004; Wilson et al., 2004). For example, an urban neighborhood would never be larger than a few miles across.…”

Section: Reasoning About Incomplete Boundariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping regions with partially defined boundaries

Plewe

2021

Transactions in GIS

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“…Many researchers have proposed methods to determine the geographic scope of web pages to enable geographic search engines, sometimes known as geospatial Internet browsing, geographic information retrieval (GIR), or local search (Buyukkokten et al 1999, Clough 2005, Ding et al 2000, Himmelstein 2005, Martins et al 2005b, McCurley 2001, Riekert 2002, Zong et al 2005, and other work has attempted to extend the geographic scope from its traditional point form to more detailed areas such as polygons (Schlieder et al 2001, Schockaert et al 2005, and enabling approximate spatial footprint representations (Jones et al 2001, Wilson et al 2004. When performing place name detection these methods typically rely on NLP and NER techniques which utilize gazetteers to identify geographic entities for them to index and thus create efficient searching algorithms.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, there are very few current gazetteers that can be described as highly complete or accurate. The reason for this is that it is simply far too time-consuming to manually create gazetteers at a very fine level of granularity (see Hill 2000, Wilson et al 2004 for a discussion of the problems and challenges of creating footprints, for example). Some of these problems disappear when computers are used and can spend countless hours submerged in this task without complaint, and there is no reason to prevent a gazetteer from being as detailed as possible if the information is available.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Goldberg

Wilson

Knoblock

2009

International Journal of Geographical Information Science

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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 the completeness and accuracy of gazetteers. Using these measures, the generated gazetteer is evaluated against the Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer and the Los Angeles Comprehensive Bibliographic Database. Our results indicate that a gazetteer created by our methods will be at least as complete as any gazetteer currently available for certain feature classes, while falling short in others. We conclude by offering suggestions to address these shortcomings.

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“…Originally developed as a means to manage and analyse quantitative data, the last decade has seen attempts to expand the use of GIS towards more qualitative, particularly textual, data management and analysis (Gregory & Hardie, ; Jung & Elwood, ; Kwan & Knigge, ). Geo‐referencing techniques, for example, have been used to assign a spatial footprint to place names, adding value to these data and allowing the geographic information within them to be exploited when coupled with GIS technology (Goldberg, ; Gregory & Hardie, ; Wilson et al, ). In this respect, proponents of Qualitative GIS have emphasised the power inherent in its geo‐visualisation capabilities to promote and justify its use (Jones & Evans, ; Jung & Elwood, ; Knigge & Cope, ; Knigge & Cope, ; Kwan, , ; Yuan, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping the interview transcript: Identifying spatial policy areas from daily working practices

Orford

Webb

2017

Area

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An interview transcript can be a rich source of geographical references whose potential are not always fully realised in their conventional analysis. Geo-referencing techniques can be used to assign a spatial footprint to place names, adding value to these data and allowing the geographic information within them to be exploited when coupled with GIS technology. This paper discusses a method of analysing and visualising interview transcripts in order to understand the spatial extent of public policy practitioners' activities. Through aggregation and statistical mapping it is possible to gain insight into the importance of space across a range of public policy themes and to understand the relationship between practitioner-defined policy themes and the formal administrative boundaries within which they typically work. The research demonstrates that spatial working practices rarely conform to formal administrative boundaries and that there are varying degrees of spatial focus between different policy themes within localities. It also reveals that spatial working practices can continue to be influenced by historic geographies and can be pulled in different directions, reflecting both the devolved nature of the sector and the particular geographical context of the setting. It concludes that mapping the interview transcript can add value and provide additional insights to more conventional analysis.

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A New Method for the Specification of Geographic Footprints in Digital Gazetteers

Cited by 5 publications

References 17 publications

Mapping regions with partially defined boundaries

Mapping regions with partially defined boundaries

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

Mapping the interview transcript: Identifying spatial policy areas from daily working practices

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