A Framework for Developing a Geographic Ontology for Gazetteers

Gazetteers are often used to provide information about places in the real world, including names, geographic coordinates, and feature class membership. Although this information is often sufficient to differentiate places with ambiguous geographic names, the information contained in standard gazetteers does not account for the dynamic aspect of geographic features. When utilizing multiple gazetteers, this shortcoming can cause two different places to be considered identical, or the same place to be viewed as different entities. To support the temporal continuity of geographical features, this book develops a geographic ontology that provides information regarding the evolution of coastal geographic features. Grounded in the notion of low-resolution conceptual neighborhoods, this book combines spatial data with the GeoNames gazetteer to develop the geographic ontology. Using two local datasets from Florida and Alaska, the evaluation has shown that the ontology can improve the automated matching between place names. The work should be useful to anyone who is interested in automated ontology development and gazetteer matching.