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Abstract
Gazetteers are more than basic place name directories containing names and locations for named geographic places. Most of them contain additional information, including a categorization of gazetteer entries using a typing scheme. This paper focuses on the nature of these categorization schemes. We argue that gazetteers can benefit from an ontological approach to typing schemes, providing a formalization that will better support gazetteer applications, maintenance, interoperability, and semi‐automatic feature annotation. We discuss the process of developing such an ontology as a modification of an existing feature type thesaurus; the difficulties in mapping from thesauri to ontologies are described in detail. To demonstrate the benefits of a categorization based on ontologies, a new gazetteer Web (and programming) interface is introduced and the impact on gazetteer interoperability is discussed.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Linda Hill for giving us a detailed insight into the development and conceptualization of the ADL FTT and for fruitful comments concerning the proposed conceptual design. Discussions with Naicong Li and Catharina Riedemann have shaped our ideas on how to implement the presented feature type ontology. The ideas for a shared gazetteer infrastructure and a new kind of Web interface were outcomes of the NCGIA Gazetteer Research and Practice Workshop held in December 2006 in Santa Barbara, USA. Partial funding for this work came from the SimCat project granted by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Notes
1. The concepts we specify in ontologies are representations of the concepts in our mind, which should not be confused.
2. Finally, this leads to the question of place identity which is out of scope for this paper.
3. For instance, the ADL Gazetteer Content Standard allows for a Time Period Note for names, spatial footprints and types.
4. Which is strictly speaking rather a feature type catalog than a thesaurus.
17. http://www.geonames.org/ontology/; The GeoNames ontology contains concrete places that are interlinked with each other via the contains, neighbours and nearby relationships, as opposed to the ontology on type level proposed in this paper.
19. The ADL FTT also has an abstract common super type for the top terms; however, it is neither shown in the Web interface nor specified in the thesaurus.
20. Note that this is a simplification pointing to some interesting ontological questions which cannot be discussed here for lack of space. For instance, rivers can also end in sinkholes (in ADL the top term physiographic features should be used instead).To specify sinkholes as feature types is difficult especially if the river slowly trickles away and no crisp border can be defined. To point out a possible solution we defined Inlet (a (narrow) watercourse extending into the land) as having an origin (a Lake or Sea) but without specifying a destination. Hence, one could specify destinations for individual inlets (or subtypes), but it is not mandatory for the type Inlet.
21. The ontology is under development, updated versions are available at http://sim‐dl.sourceforge.net/downloads/.
22. A (prototypical) server implementation is available at http://sim‐dl.sourceforge.net/downloads.
23. The technical term feature is avoided in the user interface in favor of the more common place.
24. Description Logic Implementation Group, http://dig.sourceforge.net/
25. Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering: http://www.loa‐cnr.it/DOLCE.html