Multi-source toponym data integration and mediation for a meta-gazetteer service

Abstract

A variety of gazetteers exist based on administrative or user contributed data. Each of these data sources has benefits for particular geographical analysis and information retrieval tasks but none is a one fit all solution. We present a mediation framework to access and integrate distributed gazetteer resources to build a meta-gazetteer that generates augmented versions of place name information. The approach combines different aspects of place name data from multiple gazetteer sources that refer to the same geographic place and employs several similarity metrics to identify equivalent toponyms. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.