Introduction to digital gazetteer research

Abstract

Digital gazetteers provide information on named features, linking the feature's name with its location and its type. They have been growing in importance recently as the basis of a range of services, including way‐finding, georeferencing, and intelligence. This introduction to the following collection of five research papers expands on contemporary applications of digital gazetteers, explores the issues associated with each of the three types of information, and defines three broad areas of research: the components of gazetteers; the process by which places are named and evolve; and the issues of interoperability between digital gazetteers. Each area is represented by at least one paper in the collection. Digital gazetteers increasingly form the interface between the informal discourse of humans and the formal world of geographic information science.

Keywords:

• Digital gazetteer
• Place names
• Interoperability
• Conflation

Acknowledgements

We thank the 43 participants at the specialist meeting for stimulating discussion, doctoral student Jordan Hastings and staff member Guylene Gadal for their assistance, the 37 reviewers who provided helpful comments on the papers submitted for this special issue, and the National Geospatial‐Intelligence Agency for financial support.